Kathleen Collins
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd i 112/10/192/10/19 10:4110:41 AMAM Visionaries: Th inking Th rough Female Filmmakers Series Editors Lucy Bolton and Richard Rushton
Titles in the series include:
Th e Cinema of Marguerite Duras: Feminine Subjectivity and Sensoriality Michelle Royer
Ana Kokkinos: An Oeuvre of Outsiders Kelly McWilliam
Kathleen Collins: Th e Black Essai Film Geetha Ramanathan
Habiba Djahnine: Memory Bearer Sheila Pett y
edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/vision
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd iiii 112/10/192/10/19 10:4110:41 AMAM Kathleen Collins
The Black Essai Film
Geetha Ramanathan
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd iiiiii 112/10/192/10/19 10:4110:41 AMAM For Kehan DeSousa
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutt ing-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
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© Geetha Ramanathan, 2020, under a Creative Commons Att ribution-NonCommercial licence
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List of fi gures vi Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1 1. Th e New York Black Independents 13 2. Th e black essai fi lm 31 3. Ambiguities of auteurship 51 4. Th e magical marvelous modern 83 5. Sacred doubles 100 6. Film across drama and art 117 7. Black feminist culture and black masculinity 132 Aft erword 150
Bibliography 152 Filmography 161 Index 164
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1.1 Ganja and Hess: Inhabiting the landscape 16 2.1 Cruz Brothers: Th e brothers in Miss Malloy’s house 39 2.2 Losing Ground: Playing the role of Frankie 48 2.3 Carmen Jones: “I could have been another Dorothy Dandridge.” Sara in Losing Ground 48 2.4 Carmen Jones: Violence against women 49 3.1 Cruz Brothers: Th e ethnographer 61 3.2 Cruz Brothers: Th e fi gure of fate? 62 3.3 Losing Ground: “Form, color, light” 71 3.4 Losing Ground: “Don’t you take your dick out like it was artistic like it’s some goddamn paintbrush” 73 3.5 Losing Ground: Male artist/auteur 75 4.1 Cruz Brothers: Miss Malloy greets the brothers 92 4.2 Cruz Brothers: Nostalgia or desire? 96 5.1 Losing Ground: Sara and Duke in the metafi lm 111 5.2 Losing Ground: Johnny betrays Frankie 112 6.1 Losing Ground: Th e second screen 119 6.2 Losing Ground: Tableau vivant 124
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I am deeply grateful to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in allowing me access to the material of Kathleen Collins. Nina Lorez Collins was extremely generous in allowing me to work with her mother, Kathleen Collins’s, unpublished plays, and other writi ngs. Th ank you. Th e College of Arts and Humanities at West Chester University provided me with a RA CA grant to do the research for this book. Th anks are particularly due to Dr. Hyoejin Yoon who facilitated the process. My gratitude to Professor James Trotman, Founding Director of the Douglass Institute for his expansive vision of African American literature and culture. Warm thanks to Lucy Bolton and Richard Rushton for their careful reading of the typescript. I deeply appreciate the assistance of Joe Watt s of the Digital Media Centre for his work on the clips in this book. Th anks as usual to Dana, Amanda, Neil, and Jenn at FH Green Library. I am grateful to the Edinburgh University Press production team for their diligence, particularly Eliza Wright. On a more personal note, I would like to thank Mona Fayad, who has been extremely supportive. Th anks also to Neus Bonet Farran who accompanied me on yet another research trip, and Anil for hospitality. And lastly, Vek for his enthusiasm for the project, and Dhario for many conversations on black fi lm.
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Th is book makes the case that Kathleen Collins decisively redefi ned the parameters of African American fi lm withTh e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and Losing Ground. Collins’s presentation of black interiority eff ectively inserts fi lm as a “positive scene of instruction” for African Americans, correcting the pejorative values att ached to African American fi lm as the “negative scene of instruction” (Wallace 1993b: 212). As a cultural tool, fi lm consistently appears unassailable for African Americans. Collins comments on the persistence of Hollywood defi nitions of African Americans on the cultural imaginary:
Film is the biggest, most powerful and most potent mythology. And we have not refl ected on the possibility of our being able to use this mythology . . . The Gods and Goddesses of America are fi lm stars. This is the Greek mythology of America and we don’t know where we fi t in this mythology. How can we take a camera in our hands and speak of this sacred myth of fi lm and Hollywood when we would damage this mythology? (Franklin 1980)
In decisively inserting black/minority authority in her fi lms, Collins intervenes in this celluloid cult of a quasi-divine white nation where black/minority subjects are invisible or diminished in scale. Her fi lmsTh e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982) off er a world view sharply at odds with received Hollywood mythologies on African Americans.
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Conventions of blackface in the cinema of att ractions and early silent fi lm render the presence of black subjects on screen hypothetical, ultimately fantasmatic. Black presence was simulta- neously obviated, and referenced metonymically as the grotesque (Danow 1995). Wallace’s comment about the extremely distraught relationship between blackness and visuality/visibility persists in other visual formats, even the strictly mimetic such as CCTV that capitalize on a dialectic of white invisibility and black visibility to narrativize blackness as “socially undesirable” (Marriot 2007: xiv). White invisibility, black visibility but black absence has persisted since early silent fi lm,Th e Birth of a Nation (dir. Griffi th, 1915) functioning as a model. African American fi lm criticism has established thatTh e Birth of a Nation constructed a cinematic world where black subjects had forfeited the right to exist except as appendages to white superiors, what Manthia Diawara identifi es as “the ban on Blacks participating in bourgeois humanism on Hollywood screens” (1993: 4–5). Further, by inscribing an unthinking racial binary, the fi lm excluded black subjects from national belonging, rendering them the abject of white citizens. Th e Birth of a Nation was not the only repository of such imagery; earlier silent fi lms had purveyed these images, although it is important to note that many fi lms were ambivalent about codings of racial superiority (Stewart 2005: 1–19). Th e fi lm’s sophisticated narrative and aesthetic polish exerted disproportionate infl uence on cinema history, and on the public imaginary. Th e drama is played out in the very title of the fi lm in the presumed contrast between the Klansmen’s defense of the nation as embodied by the virtue of the white “lady” and the villainous black buck who rends the ideals of the “new” nation. Th e white woman is synecdochic of the white nation; defending her establishes the purity and whiteness of the nation. Th e over-sexed black buck with the whites of his teeth gleaming, produced by the stock that accentuated the blackface features of the white actor playing the role, would remain a staple of the national imaginary. Its continued sway over the cultural iconography of African Americans is eloquently parodied in
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Spike Lee’s 2018 BlacKkKlansman where he shows a chapter of the Klansmen watching the more infamous clips of the movie aft er the investiture of the latest Klansman. Th e fi lm functions as an unholy palimpsest to the moment in the 1970s when the fi lm is set, and to contemporary white nationalist marches. Th e Birth of a Nation established four major archetypes that dominated the screen, and as late as the 1990s, students of African American fi lm classes could identify them in shows in black television networks and mainstream fi lm: for men, the coon and the buck; for women, the Jezebels and the mammies. “Bourgeois humanism” is further rendered impossible by the Motion Picture Production Code, or “Hays Code” (1930), that the Motion Picture Association used to censor itself to forestall state interference with the content of the fi lms. Th e Code explicitly forbade any story involving miscegenation and/or imaging of interracial romance. Th us, black subjects alone—this did not include people of Latin American origin—were barred from enjoying the magic of the movies, the love story. Blackface with respect to women continues even aft er the emergence of sound fi lm that eff ectively allowed black subjects historical presence as distinct from the ghosted absent menace that primitive or silent fi lm enjoined. During the sound era the idea of black women as part of the fabric of nation remains largely unacceptable. Mark Reid sums this up pithily in his comment about fi lms from the 1930s including the canonicalImitation of Life (dir. Stahl, 1934):
In one brushstroke these fi lms paint interracial landscapes in varying racial tones and with another brushstroke hide cultural diff erence behind the pale mask of white actresses. These blackface romances permitted mainstream fi lm audiences to safely consume the black heroine’s corporal image without fear of transgressing codes that forbid miscegenation. Honoring these codes insured [sic] the screening of most of these fi lms in the South where racial segregation condemned racial border crossings of all kinds. (Reid 2005: 80)
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Th us, in a curious circumvention of the Hays Code of 1930 whereby black Americans were not to be seen in romantic re- lationships with european americans,1 these fi lms continued to purvey the Hegelian master–slave dialectic, reinforcing the cinematic national imaginary. Reid brings this point into play to argue that these tropes are being reiterated in US fi lms as late as the 1990s when both of Collins’s fi lms had already been released. Comedies such as White Men Can’t Jump (dir. Shelton, 1992) and Made in America (dir. Benjamin, 1993) do not really move away from the minstrel tradition in fi lm (Reid 2005: 79). Th e philosophical tone of Collins’s fi lms in the early 1980s, at a time when fairly tiresome tropes on race were being exercised, not unsurprisingly, resulted in a mixed reception, suggesting perhaps that audiences had not really been prepared for the kind of fi lms she, along with other independent black fi lmmakers, had set out to make (Horak 2015; Stallings 2015). Collins’s fi lm had been released in the independent circuit—the Museum of Modern Art had screened Losing Ground as part of its Cineprobe series in 19832—but did not secure the kind of commercial release that Lee’s Do the Right Th ing (1989) had. Critical emphasis on sociological representation, and a unitary black identity politics in evaluating African American fi lm skewed the reception of Collins’s fi lms. Critics are beginning to recognize black female auteurial presence in fi lm if only in the alternative sector, suggesting that Kathleen Collins along with Alile Sharon Larkin “have been revered as outstanding and infl uential independent voices” (Donalson 2003: 6). A more recent reading of her work that places her outside the identity politics of the LA School of independents is accurate (Beverly 2012). Th at black fi lm could have value as art was a minority perspective, the representational load being the only criterion. One critic’s polemic, as recently as 2016, urging that black fi lm be included in black visual culture, speaks to the continued dominance of exclusively sociological values in discussing African American fi lm (Harris 2016). Of course, there were a group of black women fi lmmakers who, like Collins, att ended to themes that were diff erent from what
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mainstream cinema produced, independent fi lmmakers, such as Zeinabu irene Davis and Camille Billops, among others. However, their focus on the “ancestral archive,” a hearkening back to African traditions and heritage as part of the search for identity, speaks only partly to Collins’s work (Ryan 2005). It is in this context that Reid correctly acknowledges Collins’s contribution. Under the heading “Th e Womanist Film and the Black Professional,” he maintains that “Losing Ground marks the fi rst appearance of a black professional woman as protagonist in black independent fi lms, and it is one of a very few portrayals of developing feminist consciousness in a black professional woman in any feature-length fi lm” (Reid 2005: 121). With the trope of the artist/intellectual/professional woman, Collins allows black female characters access to what Diawara calls “bourgeois humanism” (1993: 4). Sara, the lead character in Losing Ground, is, in other words, allowed to think and worry about matt ers not exclusively connected with race, such as intellectual creativity, passion, pleasure, art, work. Collins viewed women’s creativity as an unpredictable and potentially threatening force; she was deeply aware of how dangerous a woman’s intellect could be to her sett ling comfortably in her role as a woman in society. Interestingly, she identifi es this belief as feminist:
But if there is any way in which women tend to be self- destructive it is in that area of creativity where they actually feel their own power and can’t either acknowledge it or go into it with as much . . . They can’t go to the end of it. They get scared and they retreat into illness or into having too many babies or destructive love aff airs with men who run them ragged. Somewhere or other, they detour out of a respect for their own creativity. (Nicholson 1988/9: 9)
In choosing topics such as female creativity and authority, Collins was stepping into new territory even as the cultural wars on black authenticity were raging. Were critiques, particularly feminist critiques, suffi ciently black, or were they hostile to authentic
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blackness? In exploring a black female’s critical view of the artistic and intellectual black community, Collins was forced to counter constructions of blackness and of black femininity. Th e policing of what black art should be is also noted by a “shocked” Nicholson. Losing Ground, screened at Spelman College, a historically black university in Atlanta, Georgia, elicited this response from one man who told Collins that she was a “race traitor.” Th at she “hewed to no party line,” but sought out moral subtlety, also discomfi ted an unnamed, well-known fi lmmaker who said, “he did not like Losing Ground because it was a negative portrait of a black marriage” (Nicholson 1988/9: 7). A 2017 New York Amsterdam News report entitled “Visionary Filmmaker Kathleen Collins Featured” is a measure of how welcome her ideas are now, almost thirty-fi ve years down the road: “It Losing[ Ground] was never released widely, in part because at the time, and [sic] it was not racially refl ective of the Black Experience” (Matt hews 2017). Whose Black Experience? Th at Collins also made a fi lm about another minority group, Puerto Ricans living in New York, was equally incomprehensible. She reports that while making Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy she was repeatedly asked why she wanted to make a movie about “some Puerto Ricans and some dying Irish lady” (Nicholson 1988/9: 13). Th e quirky dance between the Puerto Rican boys and the Irish woman in Cruz Brothers speaks of existential choices that bypass identity politics. Th e stakes were high for Collins, who had explored the magical expansion of boundaries in the 1960s during her participation in the Freedom Riders. Th e Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, with its promise of the summer of love, peace and freedom for all, and specifi cally the att ack against Jim Crow, could be expected to be an epistemic breach of a historic patt ern of nullifying and segregating black masculinity and femininity from the larger culture. In 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality called for black and white students to ride in buses together from the northeast of the United States to New Orleans to participate in the seventh anniversary of the decision on Brown vs. Board of Education that
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ordered the integration of public schools. In the South, however, white-only waiting rooms were the norm; Jim Crow was still king, and blacks were never permitt ed to sit in the front of the bus; consequently, seating black and white students together was regarded as a bold, if not radical move towards integration. Middle-class college students, black and white, male and female, were trained by the Congress in techniques of non-violent protest. Th at Martin Luther King Jr. chose not to join the Freedom Riders caused one of the fi rst rift s in the Civil Rights Movement. Th e 1960 Supreme Court ruling that segregation of black people in buses was against the law spurred the students who were largely bourgeois and who were appalled that there were other Americans who were still being subject to Jim Crow despite the ruling. For the black bourgeoisie it was a challenge that leaves lasting psychic tremors. Kathleen Collins, the only black student in her classes at the elite Skidmore College, its student body almost all white, went South too, and as a nineteen-year-old was imprisoned briefl y in an Albany cell, came back to her hometown of Jersey City in New Jersey, and reported on the struggle to end segregation, expressing hope.3 A collection of short stories entitled Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? refl ects on “race” as defi ned by this moment, suggesting that if young european americans were startled by the lived realities of race in the South, so were privileged African Americans living in the North. Collins’s family had been in the States since the Mayfair. Th e divestiture of that kind of “Negro” privilege would be, in most cases, psychologically challenging, particularly the sense that many light-skinned elite blacks had been living an unreality, ever att empting to become “lighter” and to be the “fi rst” black in diff erent fi elds of endeavor including politics and education. Collins explores these scars on racial and gender identities in her fi ctionand her plays. One thread runs through her work on these themes, whether visible or invisible, of the notionality of race, of how an abstract, distant construct prevents black women and men from experiencing their humanity fully; at the fullest moment, blackness or non-blackness threatens to drain the joy, leaving only the void.
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In place of identifying exclusively as black, Collins identifi ed as black and . . . She preferred the term minority, in the most expansive sense possible (Rhinehart 2016). In both her fi lms, the central fi gures are characters, defi ned as minorities, who are invested in recording their stories, aware of trying to both ground themselves and lose themselves. Sara of Losing Ground grapples with the path to otherworldly ecstasy—mystical, erotic, mystical and erotic (Ramanathan 2006; Stallings 2011). Sara’s framework is comparative and philosophical as she seeks to expand the traditional boundaries of western metaphysics. Th e trope of the book in African American literature, central to the emphasis on literacy and the intellect, functions as a mnemonic device in the fi lm. A relatively unusual motif, if powerful, in both African American and women’s fi lm, it occurs in Germaine Dulac’sTh e Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) when Mme. Beudet, a latt er-day Mme. Bovary fi gure, reads Baudelaire and becomes aware of her own desire. Sara, on the other hand, suff ers because of being an intellectual: aside from her students who admire her, the culture constantly admonishes her for being bookish and apprehending life through books. While it is not surprising for an intellectual to att empt to understand the world through lett ers, what might be admirable in other groups makes of Sara an oddity—a black woman intellectual. Victor in Th e Cruz Brothers is presented as an ethnographer in the making, a character comparable to the young black photographer in Lee’s Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop (1983), but unlike him, Victor is isolated and struggling to make larger generalizations about his community. Victor is the oldest of three brothers. Th eir father, shot in a bank robbery gone awry, appears only to Victor. Th e fi lm itself is based on a short story writt en by Henry Roth, who was a colleague of Collins in the City College of New York. Unlike some of her contemporaries, such as Spike Lee and Charles Burnett , Collins did not go to fi lm school to learn fi lmmaking but had academic credentials in fi lm theory and had done work towards a doctorate in French cinema. As a master’s student of French literature, she went to Paris and studied at the Middlebury College at the Sorbonne where she took a course in
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French literature and fi lm that captivated her; the art of adapting stories to fi lm or fi nding the language to narrate the story in fi lm was to be an abiding interest (Collins 1984a). She translated for Cahiers du cinema and did a monograph for Editions du Seuil entitled Cinéma et Racisme in 1969.4 She notes that she did not really care for Hollywood but was an avid reader. Th e literary infl uence—reading and writing—features prominently in her fi lms (Klotman [1982] 2015). In all, by 1988, Collins had writt en four screenplays. As early as 1971, she had writt en the script of “Women, Sisters, and Friends” and had gone around the country trying to fi nd funding but was repeatedly told that although the script was a “wonderful idea,” she should fi nd someone else to direct and produce it. She found the path to the director’s chair well and truly blocked. Collins is matt er of fact about it: “Nobody would give any money to a black woman to direct a fi lm” (Nicholson 1988/9: 10).Th e New Yorker’s Richard Brody was to rave about the script as the best fi lm that no one would be able to stream on Netfl ix in February 2019 (Brody 2019). While not having access to fi lm direction in the 1970s, Collins did become among the fi rst in the country to start teaching fi lm, which was newly emerging as a respectable fi eld of study in the US. From 1974, she taught directing and screen writing in City College of New York (Nicholson 1988/9: 10). By that time, she had had considerable hands-on experience in editing, which she regarded as nothing short of “magical” (Klotman [1982] 2015). She had worked on editing several fi lms, including Ossie Davis’s Cott on Comes to Harlem (1970), for which she was not credited. A skilled editor, she won fi rst prize for editing at the Cannes Film Festival 1970 for a short, Stock Exchange Transplant (dir. Collins, 1970), and fi rst prize for editing the feature fi lm Touching Ground, also directed by Douglas Collins, at the Chicago Film Festival, also in 1970.5 Diffi cult as it is for most independent fi lmmakers to fi nd funding for their projects, all of them struggling for the same limited funds, it is even more diffi cult for African American fi lmmakers, and almost miraculous for an African American woman who wants to make a feature-length fi lm. As Michelle Parkerson put it
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in a tribute issue of Black Film Review, “She [Collins] was among the fi rst generation of Black female directors breaching the ‘inner sanctum’ of feature fi lm production” (1988/9: 5). Collins’s universalist philosophy is apparent in her exploration of the characters in Cruz Brothers and Losing Ground. How important is identity politics to black and minority subjects in New York City, its suburbs, and the US in the 1980s? Collins throws these questions to her characters through the action of the fi lm, bringing her formidable theatrical experience to bear in sett ing up situations, and in developing them.
Overview
Th e approach of this book is comparative, historical, and formalistic in its att ention to cinematic detail. While off ering full-length interpretations of the fi lm, I embed the fi lms in the larger discussion on otherness, visuality in relationship to aurality and to black female identity, the role of art in life and life in art, and the place of philosophy in art and fi lm. Th e book’s core argument is that Collins probes areas of fundamental human existence in highly explosive social and political confrontations but off ers resolutions, or approaches, that forward her desire that everyone fi nd a way to their story. And in this endeavor, her fi lms reveal the interiority and narrate the stories of those who in their passionate search had been silenced because they were thought to have no ideas. Th rough the chapters, the book makes connections between Collins and other feminist fi lmmakers, particularly in terms of cinematic strategies, to further secure Collins in the canon of world feminist fi lm, and to consolidate her place in the African American fi lm tradition (Ramanathan 2006: 141–68). Collins’s contributions to the New York Black Independents, along with the importance of the New York fi lm movement, enriches African American fi lm history, as it does the history of women fi lmmakers and that of independent fi lmmakers.
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Chapter 1 traces the diverse genres of the black independent movement, draws out a genealogy of black fi lmmakers, and identifi es connections across script writers, camera persons, directors, and actors. Featuring a comparative analysis of both the Los Angeles School and the New York School, the chapter seeks to draw out the specifi city of the philosophy of art and race that Collins explores. Chapter 2 contextualizes ideas of contemporary philosophers and writers on the cosmopolitan and universalist to suggest some ways in which to locate and identify Collins’s visionary aspects as seen in the fi lms. Whether it is a Cruz brother who tells his story through the visions he has of his father, or the painter who does it through abstract art, Collins introduces and develops a new genre of African American fi lm: the black essai fi lm. Chapter 3 returns to a topic of perennial fascination for fi lm scholars, and of more immediate urgency for African American fi lm: auteurship. For both european and euro-american women it has been diffi cult to claim the exalted title of auteur, reserved for the likes of a Truff aut or a Hitchcock. Collins would appear to be ambivalent about the status of the auteur, or the grand creator with his/her vision of the fi lm. Bothher fi lms question whether the creator is more important than the created, whether the architect is more central than the journeywoman/man, seriously deconstructing the authority of the auteur over her text. Yet, even as an example of the cancellation of auteurial control, her world view as translated by the techniques of fi lmmaking leaves no doubt as to the legitimacy of her place in fi lm history as an auteur with a distinctive vision realized through a very specifi c visual and auditory aesthetic. In the next three chapters, I seek to identify the moment that the character in the diegesis moves from her/his space and occupies the space of the other. I discuss the use of modernist aesthetics and magical realism in articulating these shift s. Is either mode more useful to moving beyond the limited? How does this change enhance individual authenticity? How is this authenticity implicated in universalism? How does it help one
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identify one’s story? How does Collins shift the notion of the “minor” character? How does this aesthetic construct aff ect our views of the dominant majority and the minority? With a view to being specifi c about the strategies Collins uses to convey her ideas, I analyze the fi lms in detail with respect to visuality and the auditory in these readings of as many as three sequences from each fi lm. In part, the analysis is formalist and semiotic. eTh purpose of these chapters is to show the intricate connections between narrative, philosophy of race, and visuality as played out in the fi lms. I conclude that Collins’s inter-arts approach, situating fi lm and visuality as one of the components of a larger African American/African American feminist cultural production, fi nally allows cinema to serve as “the positive scene of instruction” for African American culture (Wallace 1993b: 212). Th e fi nal chapter discusses the themes and techniques of some of Collins’s published and unpublished writings to indicate that her vision of black masculinity and black femininity was informed by an awareness of how black women artists consistently resist racial bracketings to expand universal understandings
Notes
1 I use ‘european american’, ‘european’ and ‘euro-american’ lower case throughout to counter the privileging of european american women in feminist discourse, and the equation of women as a universal category with european american women. 2 MOMA would later screen Losing Ground in October 2017. 3 See
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 1212 112/10/192/10/19 10:4110:41 AMAM 1 The New York Black Independents
Th e recent history of African American fi lm studies has been devoted to the twin goals of critiquing dominant representations and presenting the work of independent black fi lmmakers. Black independent fi lmmaking has a long history stretching back to the silent era when “race” fi lms were popular. It is salutary to note that the work of independent fi lmmakers, including that of pioneering silent movie director, Oscar Micheaux, who had produced and exhibited a huge corpus, did not begin to receive scholarly att ention until the 1970s. Early responses found Micheaux’s fi lms wanting by Hollywood studio standards (Bogle 1973). eTh 80s and 90s challenged this view of Micheaux, and “race fi lms,” arguing that the techniques used presented rhetorical statements relevant to African American audiences (Cripps 1993; Gaines 1993; Bowser et al. 2001). Interest in these fi lms was widespread among these audiences, who were avid moviegoers but were confi ned to specifi c areas of the movie theatre. However, between 1910 and 1925 they could avail of the 425 black-owned theatres that were indicative of African American investment in the motion picture business (Streible 1993). Interest in recording the history of black participation in the industry is unfl agging, and fi lm scholars have been sustained in their eff orts to recover the history of black independent fi lmmaking, particularly to retrieve and restore the fi lms of the silent era. There were about 125 independent companies producing hundreds of fi lms in the hope of “[countering] prevailing caricatures of African-Americans on
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fi lm” (Pearl Bowser qtd in Reed [1980] 2018). eTh coming of sound slowly put these companies out of business, but materials pertaining to their history, insofar as they have come to light, have been preserved by archivist Pearl Bowser in a collection called “African Diaspora Images.” While there are signifi cant aesthetic diff erences in approach between black independent fi lmmakers of the earlier part of the century and the Los Angeles School in the 1960s, the imperative to challenge illusionistic Hollywood projections of black subjects remains a constant. Th e work of Kathleen Collins belongs to this capacious genre, more specifi cally to the group called New York Black Independents. Not only did Collins play a central role in this group in the 1970s, she also helped shape its aesthetic vision. When asked if she considered herself a black fi lmmaker, Collins said that she thought of herself as a person who had an instinctive understanding of what it meant to belong to a minority (Franklin 1981).1 As with many black independent fi lmmakers, the signifi cance of Kathleen Collins’s work for African American, world, and feminist fi lm has only recently been recognized by the larger public. Programmed by Michelle Materre and Jake Perlin, the Lincoln Center’s fi lm screenings “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986” brought her work to a wider audience. Among the fi lms that were shown at the retrospective were Spike Lee’s She’s Gott a Have It (1986), Charles Lane’s Sidewalk Stories (1989), and an impressive series of documentaries, including Will (dir. Maple, 1981) and I Remember Harlem (dir. Miles, 1981). Collins’s Losing Ground headlined the series. Since then, the New York Black Independents have also received signifi cant scholarly att ention as part of a focused academic venture “toward recovery as a prioritized practice” (Forster 2015: 64). In a discussion on the larger implications of such research, Forster (2015) notes that the continued investment of black audiences in sociologically verifi able rep- resentations might tempt audiences to see past the repertoires
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of performance in buried material to locate true, or singular, records of a black time past. He credits the curators of the series with off ering a wide enough range of fi lms to counteract notions of an unmediated back access to a defi nitive black past. eTh inclusion of diverse genres helped to draw att ention to the role that genre and performance plays in representation. Further, documentaries refrained from singling any one fi lm out as “the” black fi lm. Hence, to gain a more nuanced understanding of Collins’s fi lms, it is important to locate them in the range of fi lms available at that time. Forster’s comments on the fi lms makes a bold claim for them: “Understated in form, the series’ selections present the revolutionary possibilities of ordinary black life in an anti-black world” (Forster 2015: 64). Th e “understated” form is a litt le enigmatic; the Collins fi lms are almost excessively careful about form. Th e understatement perhaps refers to a sustained att ention to the story as distinct from an emphasis on visual imagery and eff ects. Th e series also featured television shows that were compilations of news stories—for example, Inside Bedford Stuyvesant (1968–71)—thereby presenting the black subject’s daily reality. As discussed through the following chapters, the placement of the black subject in fi lm as antagonist to the white subject and white America has been destructive, and even where the fi lms were resistant, black subjects themselves were unidimensional—defi ned with reference to white subjects. Th e “revolutionary” potential in these fi lms then refers to the everyday diffi culties and small transcendences that mark black subjects as both black and human, the visible att rition because of the constant friction in the most mundane of activities, and the momentary richness in the enjoyment of human connections. Collins’s fi lms fall into this broad category. eTh screening of Losing Ground in the series excited the most press att ention, partly because twenty years aft er it has been made, audiences are willing to accept its parameters, not necessarily with reference to class—the Cosby Show had done that—but because of its feminist and intellectual dimensions. And notwithstanding the release of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) to widespread
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critical acclamation, Collins’s fi lm and its philosophical edge emerges as “original” and “new.” Th e Lincoln Center screenings do Collins a service in securing her place among the New York Black Independents: fi rstly, because the fi lms are no longer “buried,” and secondly, because their originality can be appreciated without their being relegated as curiosities. Forster concludes his piece on the screenings:
What makes Tell It Like It Is so insightful is not merely that it features Losing Ground but that it contextualizes its screening within a specifi c era when a community of black fi lmmakers working in New York established a sort of underground production studio. (Forster 2015: 69)
During the 80s the New York Black Independents were able to secure funding from some government sources, and television distribution was considered worth trying and securing, but for real support, the artists turned to each other.
Figure 1.1 Ganja and Hess: Inhabiting the landscape
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Eff orts to establish the New York Black Independents is ongoing. Black Camera of Spring 2018 posted a call for papers for a special issue on the New York Black Independents with Collins featuring prominently. Th e eff ort is in part restitutive, to credit black fi lmmakers on the east coast of the US, to understand their institutional positions, and to recognize their aesthetics as distinct from those of the Los Angeles Independents. Black Camera’s description is worth quoting in full for an understand- ing of the diff erences between the cinematic practices of the New York Black Independents, and the Los Angeles “rebels,” and for the place Collins has in the New York group, fast being recognized as a “school”:
Figures like Gunn and Collins, who were once pejoratively characterized as “belonging to the Hudson River school of cinematography” turned to both the stage and page as writers, sculpting worlds of middle-class black life that cut across time and prescribed notions of legible blackness. (Black Camera 2018: 6)
Th e key word “legible” bears expansion. Th e suggestion is that the New York Black Independents do not represent blackness in highly readable ways, the inference here being that other fi lmmakers take recourse to recognizable signifi ers of blackness that reify dominant notions implicitly, if not explicitly. Feminist fi lmmakers such as Gurinder Chadha were later to rely on a strategy of “layering” cultural imagery to bolster the context of subaltern subjects without making them stereotypically readable. Landscape provides the context for the characters in Th e Cruz Brothers, presenting viewers with a familiar context in mainstream high culture but less so in the African American cultural context. Th e “Hudson River School of cinematography” carries derogatory values; the fi lmmakers were summarily dismissed for their ostensible romanticization of nature and their escape from reality to a pre-industrial Romantic past. Th e special issue seeks to redress this grievance. Th e interest in the landscape that Collins’s Cruz Brothers and Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess (1973) show fl ies in
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the face of a strictly representational, overtly politicized program for black fi lmmakers. Even as there are elements of the Romance genre in Collins’s two fi lms and inGanja and Hess, they are deeply philosophical and off er a world view cognizant of race. Th eir investment in the other arts, whether theatre or writing, carried over to fi lm, and in that sense the fi lms, particularly Collins’s, are indebted to the larger African/African American literary tradition at least as much as they are to African American fi lm history. Th e LA School is not to be viewed as a total oppositional point, however, for as the call mentions, the New York Black Independents are their “analog” (Black Camera 2018: 6). Th e LA rebellion implicitly followed Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s call for a “Th ird Cinema” that forcefully established the “essential integrity of black and so-called Th ird World fi lm cultures” (Willemen 1994: viii). Seeking to change reactionary forces, fi lmmakers used anti-illusionist techniques to foreground the educational mission. Aspects of its aesthetic are derived from the Latin American Espinosa’s notion of “imperfect cinema,” one that is hard hitt ing, and avoids high production values. Both Th ird Cinema and imperfect cinema were open to endless revision of aesthetic strategies, and multiplication in other parts of the world, as long as the fi lms were an “expression of a new culture and of social changes” (Willemen 1994: 8). Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1974) is an example of the core values of the LA School, revealing as it does the grinding oppression of poverty, compounded with race, and gender that the protagonist undergoes. Coming to UCLA aft er the Watt s riots of 1965, Gerima also brought a consciousness of anti-colonial struggles that infl ected the thinking of the group that studied writers such as Kenya’s Ngugi and Martinique’s Fanon (Masilela 1993). Gerima’s fi lm is grainy and has the quality of newsreel footage, arresting in producing the look of a “New Wave” of African American fi lm. Charles Burnett ’s fi lm Killer of Sheep (1977) is quite diff erent in quality, and has neither the pace nor the almost panicked feeling of Bush Mama. Th e fi lm opens with footage
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that is reminiscent of the Italian neo-realists, long tracking shots establishing the city, the train tracks and the children playing in odd, beaten-down neighborhoods. Th e fi lm is almost authenti- cally realist in the Lukácsian sense of the term, describing social conditions completely, and the alienation of the working-class protagonist from his working conditions. It shows working-class consciousness but not the working class rising. Instead, despite the resistance to the conditions expressed in symbols, there is almost a sense of despair, the montage of the heads of sheep intruding on the protagonist’s interiority. Th e use of blues music as an aesthetic further marks the diff erence of this fi lm from others that used realism. Bush Mama and Killer of Sheep together off ered models of realism in African American fi lm that were a departure from previous fi lms, and that were to remain largely anomalous even as the mainstream New Realism city fi lms were released. Several diff erences can be discerned when comparing these two fi lms with Bill Gunn’sGanja and Hess and Collins’s two fi lms. Firstly, while some of the New York fi lmmakers knew each other, they were not part of a collective in the way the LA Independents were. For instance, under the aegis of the fi lm scholar Teshome Gabriel, the UCLA students studied with Glauber Rocha, who had theorized the Cinema of Hunger (Masilela 1993). Secondly, both New York fi lmmakers turned to a range of genres and devices to impart philosophical ideas. Th irdly, they were invested in writing, and as is apparent in their fi lms, bringing writing to fi lm. Fourthly, neither of them appears committ ed only to cityscapes but feature landscapes outside the city. Finally, their protagonists seek a rich personal understanding of their place in the world. Both fi lm directors lend a lot of credence to art, literature, and philosophy as topics for fi lms, and deploy them as discursive tools in the fi lm to get their ideas across, or to fl esh out their ideas in narrative. None of the three fi lms insists on the purely realistic, but they use realism, more so in the case of Losing Ground than in the other two. Bill Gunn of Ganja and Hess played the role of the artist husband of Sara in Losing Ground, Duane Williams of Th e Night
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of the Living Dead played Duke, and Seret Scott , a stage actor for whom Collins had writt en plays, was cast as Sara Rogers, the philosophy professor. At fi rst glance,Ganja and Hess could not be further from Collins’s fi lms. A vampire/horror/parody of Blaxploitation fi lm, it is free of all vestiges of cinematic realism. Yet, if one were to apply Collins’s own idea that the diffi culty for the fi lmmaker was to fi nd “narrative solutions” to tell the story or convey philosophical ideas, Gunn had hit upon an unusual cinematic cocktail to off er a grounded view of race on the United States (Collins [1980] 2015). Ganja and Hess is allegorical and has a Christian overlay, reminiscent of Spencer Williams’s Th e Blood of Jesus (1941). Yet, Christianity is not the only component of the African American protagonist’s identity; he is also infl uenced by his African past, visually depicted in the various African artefacts that contrast the european art work in the sett ings of the fi lm. Dr. Hess Green’s “blood” connection to Africa is also explored: he has been infected by a dagger of the ancient black Myrthian people. He was stabbed by a stranger with the dagger three times, “Once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Ghost.” Hess is a student of this ancient African tribe that is extinguished because of a blood disease. Plot expedients aside, the premise of the fi lm reveals the horror of race in the US: blacks are bled for their work, and never allowed to die. Slaking the rage that this inspires with blood is an incomplete solution but one that very temporarily off ers the rest that endless work denies. Th e fi lm’s sett ing off ers a Romance palett e: long and wide shots of beautiful natural sett ings, an equally grand house replete with African works of art, owned by an anthropologist and archivist, served by a butler. Th e butler’s subservience is closer to obeisance; yet, the role is played straight. Diawara and Klotman believe that Hess’s wealth shows him up for the materialist he is, and further that the fi lm critiques this materialism; rather, the set-up appears to be an imagining of an atavistic regal African past with Hess playing that role (Diawara and Klotman 1990). James E. Hinton’s cin- ematography is lush and at times threatens to abandon the story.
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Th e shots are lengthy and, because each sequence is introduced slowly, add to the density of the allegorical. One critic argues that Hinton’s hapticity draws the viewer in to appreciate the texture of fi lm itself; however, the blood spatt ers and the diff erent hues of red aft er each vampire episode could equally distance the viewer, and alienate him or her in the Brechtian sense, and compel him or her to shift from the visual to a deeper consideration of the allegory (Jackson 2018). While Ganja, the female, is a dominant character, she is not exactly folded into the philosophical frame that seems to legitimize both Hess’s vampirism and his lack of ethics. A long interlude focuses on Hess’s assistant, played by Bill Gunn, reading and writing before he commits suicide, adding to the fi lm’s philosophical and inter-arts perspective an important aspect of the aesthetic of the New York Black Independents. When Ganja and Hess is placed side by side with Losing Ground, the versatility of the New York Black Independents is made apparent. Collins does venture into the territory of spirit possession, a theme culled from Africa and its diaspora, but her fi lm has a realistic overlay that falls short of the allegorical. As Gunn’s protagonist is an institutional academic, so is her protagonist, a professor of philosophy. Reading and writing, its centrality to human thinking, is overtly foregrounded in Losing Ground, texts and philosophers explicitly referenced: Africa is symbolized by the book in both fi lms,Afr ique Noir in Ganja and Hess and Louis Mars’s Th e Crisis of Possession in Voodoo in Losing Ground. In both fi lms, art and philosophy are intertwined, with art being preponderant in Ganja and Hess, philosophy underlying the fi lm, while art and philosophy enjoy equal prominence in Losing Ground, philosophy theorizing art. Both Collins and Gunn use nature as a trope in their fi lms—Gunn inGanja and Hess and Collins in both of hers—distinguishing them from many of the other New York Black Independents. Collins is, however, very diff erent from the male New York Black Independents in her deep awareness of the exclusion of black women as full human beings in fi lm. She was sensitive to what she regarded as the “potent male imagery” in the trope of “adventure”
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fi lms in the mainstream industry, including the slough of Blax- ploitation fi lms such as Shaft 2 (dir. Parks, 1971). She commends the turn to the interior journey in some black independent fi lms but fi nds it disappointing that even the fi lms that she thinks are radical in their expression of the complex humanity of black people posit “a kind of stagnant female impotence that is made poignantly clear” (Collins 1984b: 6). Singling out Burnett ’s Killer of Sheep and Lane’s A Place in Time (1977) as fi lms that delicately evoke “true pathos,” and avoid the ignominious Stepin Fetchit archetype, she nevertheless fi nds that the female characters are “symbolic” (Collins 1984b: 6), and concludes that even these two rare fi lms view women as stepping stones in the male adventure: “Yet how sad that in the end, we are still left with stagnant female souls hovering aimlessly around the male universe. How limiting is the idea that only men despair; Women [sic] can only comfort” (Collins 1984b: 17). Spike Lee’s Nola Darling in She’s Gott a Have It could defi nitely be regarded as a female adventurer; yet, not one who voyages into the interior landscape when compared with Burnett ’s and Lane’s male heroes. Among the New York Black Independents, Spike Lee is probably the best known not merely for his enormous output since She’s Gott a Have It but also for having expressed his affi liation with New York in his fi lms. One of the chief mise- en-scènes of the fi lm, the protagonist’s apartment carries the inter-arts theme discussed earlier. A large, aesthetic space, with Nola’s collages or her newspaper cutt ings pasted on the walls, the apartment is metonymic of Nola’s att ractiveness. Nola works as a paste-up artist and is an independent woman. As in Ganja and Hess, She’s Gott a Have It begins with the writt en word, a literary epigraph from Zora Neale Hurston, one that frames the female in sympathetic terms but also one that distinguishes quite clearly between male and female desire. Lee’s fi lm is about a black female and her life, inviting comparison with Collins’s Losing Ground. Shot in black and white fi lm,She’s Gott a Have It is innovative in using a narrative scheme to assemble a group portrait of a woman, Nola Darling, who lives on her own and has multiple male sexual
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partners. Lee uses direct cinema techniques to characterize Nola as fresh, engaging, and a woman living on her own terms; she is not anyone’s “girl.” Th e fi lm is wry and mocks the men slyly, defl ecting their narrative authority, as they are among the primary narrators of Nola Darling’s story. Th e tension in the fi lm is between Nola’s refusal to cede sole proprietorship of her body to one of her three sexual partners, and their insistence that she should. Th e assumptions of the fi lm, the philosophy that Nola starts and ends by espousing, are enjoying new life as a Netfl ix show. However, the philosophy is subsumed by the dominance of the male presence in the fi lm. eTh men themselves reductively believe Nola is just greedy—her punishment, rape. Th e fi lm slips out of the philosophical mode with the att ack on Nola. Further, over the course of the fi lm, Nola’s autonomy that secured her sexuality is now reversed when her autonomy is challenged by her sexuality. National Public Radio’s reviewer off ers a comparison on how the two fi lms have withstood the passage of time: “Lee’s and Collins’s fi lms are both about female liberation, but it’sLosing Ground that’s truly grounded in the struggle of achieving it, a crucial element that makes it no less revelatory now, 30 years aft er it was made” (Hachard 2015). Th at the fi lm is still considered a revelation is a sign of how unthinkable Collins’s treatment of the themes was in the 1980s and its consequent relative obscurity, while Lee’s, perhaps more obviously fi tting the notion of “female liberation,” was widely hailed. Notwithstanding Lee’s innovative fi lm techniques, and the ideas Nola inShe’s Gott a Have It forwards, feminist critics of the time have uniformly been extremely critical of Lee’s representation of the female fi gure. Jacquie Jones, for instance, considers Nola, played by Tracy Camilla Johns, a “fantasy.” Comparing this role with one she plays in Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City (1991) as a mob boss’s girlfriend, Wallace notes that “Johns’s roles best represent the ambiguity between and the narrowness of the two categories that Black women are allowed to occupy in this cinema—that of the bitch and that of the ’ho” (Jones 1992: 96).
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Although New Jack City is a mainstream fi lm,She’s Gott a Have It was not, underscoring the dearth of complex black female char- acterization, whether in independent fi lm or mainstream. Collins herself wrote a “manifesto” about the lack of female fi gures in the fi lms made by black independents at large (Williams 1994; Collins 1984b). Perhaps this is why Nola Darling is dubbed “the mother of the black female character” in the 1990s (Jones 1992); further, as recently as 2017 a blogger says that “[she admires] Nola Darling’s characteristics of being a woke black woman” (Colclough 2017). Granted, some of the ideas Nola expresses are “woke,” and the director tries to demystify the male gaze through postmodern techniques, but the male narrative in the text excludes female narrative. Collins’s Losing Ground made fi ve years earlier deals with female desire in a register that questioned its confl ation with sexual desire, but links it to many other pleasures, some sensory, some intellectual, but clearly connected to something extraordinary outside of carnal sex: “ecstasy” in one or all its variants. Th e sequences in Losing Ground that are most associated with experiencing rapt pleasure are not unmixed with other sensations, of doubt, of anguish. Th e trope of female pleasure, embedded in the erotic, is not a topic explored by mainstream fi lms, invested as they are in the pursuit of male pleasure and adventure. Although there are instances of female pleasure and satisfaction in some feminist fi lms, such asHour of the Star by Suzana Amaral (1985), these are usually only fl eeting within the diegesis of the fi lm. Collins’s fi lm is perhaps more expansive in including more than one sequence showing female pleasure in a concerted unifi ed way, a pleasure that has rarely been given voice even in women’s literature. A notable exception is Marguerite Duras in both Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) and L’Amant (1984). Th e Jean-Jacques Annaud fi lm of the same name (1992) is hard put to translate that female desire and pleasure to fi lm, the very visual qualities of the novel being hyper-exaggerated by the fi lm to no good eff ect. Curiously, although the theme of female pleasure was not touched upon, one of the very few commentaries on Collins refers to Duras and the genre and techniques of the
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New Novel as analogous to Collins’s approach in Losing Ground (Williams 1994). Among feminist philosophers, Luce Irigaray’s and Monique Witt ig’s writings on female desire and pleasure resonate with Collins’s approach, particularly the notion that the language to express such female desire and passion has yet to be found (Irigaray 1985b; Witt ig 1976). Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Th ing, like She’s Gott a Have It, also, to some extent, casts the city itself as a character, almost anthropo- morphizing it. Th e opening sequence of She’s Gott a Have It is a series of sepia-tinted shots of people, particularly children, on the streets of New York. Lee’s more extensive use of the city in Do the Right Th ing places him in that group of great urban fi lmmakers: Lang for Berlin, Rossellini for Rome, Truff aut for Paris, among others. His love aff air with the city, specifi cally what he calls “Th e Republic of Brooklyn,” emerges in almost all of his fi lms (Sterritt 2007). Collins’s Losing Ground is set partly in New York City, but the city is only a background, not a central element as it is in Lee’s fi lms, exhibiting the diff erent strands followed by the Independents. Where She’s Gott a Have It shows a Nola occupying spaces in the city with the freedom of an independent woman, Do the Right Th ing focuses on Mookie, played by Lee, walking up and down the streets of Brooklyn delivering pizzas. A comparison of Do the Right Th ing with Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy indicates very diff erent philosophies of race, and equally diff erent approaches to fi lmmaking.Do the Right Th ing features a “sympathetic racist,” Sal, the owner of the pizzeria whose impatience with a young black man’s blaring radio incites a violent confrontation that ends with the young man, Radio Raheem, being killed by the police (Flory 2006). Th e conclusion is open to interpretation: Mookie throws a trash can into the pizzeria’s window, either in hoping to appease the crowd’s thirst for revenge, or in a feeble eff ort to show that he stands with the community although he works for the pizzeria. Th e fi lm is intricate in showing communities in New York other than the African American: the Puerto Ricans are a part of the group, if not completely integrated; a vignett e of the
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Korean American store accentuates the diff erent positionalities of minorities in the community. Lee shows the fault-lines in the community, particularly the sense of the black community becoming “woke” over issues of representation. Th e black clients of the pizzeria are beginning to question the complete absence of African Americans in Sal’s photographic displays of Italian Americans. Th e fi lm is organized around some binaries—love/ hate, MLK Jr/Malcolm—but the cleverness of the fi lm is in not gett ing into the binary of black/white, and rather showing the institutional power of white authority aligning itself with the light-skinned migrant, the Italian. Realistic, the fi lm is rooted very much in the local, and although not dated, it is very much of its time. Any statement on race is made through the action of the fi lm itself, organized around the unities of time, place, and action, and complete with a Brooklyn Mayors Chorus of old men commenting on the action, overseen by a Sister Mother from a second fl oor embrasure, a being from on high. Both Th e Cruz Brothers and Losing Ground depict a multi-ethnic community in and around New York City, and in Rockland and Westchester Counties. Collins routes race through the personal stories of her characters, not the other way around. Th e city itself seems less inhabitable than Lee’s Brooklyn with its houses, its steps, and its streets that the residents claim as their “own,” however erroneously. A Puerto Rican in New York City, Celia, in Losing Ground, leaves the city aft er two years to come to Rockland County. She claims that she hates New York and that it smells. In Th e Cruz Brothers, the three young Puerto Rican men move to a place outside the city, their refrain: “At least it’s not the Bronx.” Th e Bronx is something they have left behind, and while they do not elaborate on the diffi culties of the urban, they remember those experiences. In their new place, José says, “Th at’s still amazing, living in this sweet litt le town, not the Bronx . . .” Collins emphasizes their joy in the house that brings them a feeling of inclusion, their pleasure in basic living conditions not possible for them in the city. In some senses, this new place outside the city aff ords them a chance at life; unlike the city that, we are to
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believe, both separated the brothers and swallowed them. Details of the debris in their house are contrasted with the sett ing. From their living quarters, the brothers can see pale greenery, some of it artfully landscaped, with a view towards the distant hills. Th e many shots of the landscape are eff ected with an eye to creating an artistic palett e, nature itself symbolically representing the unspoken aspirations of the brothers. As an element in the fi lm, nature functions ideologically and, in the best traditions of the Romance genre, is benefi cent. At the narrative level, the satisfaction of the brothers with this new town outside the city throws a glare on the absent narrative of the city, suggesting an abyss in contrast to the plenitude of nature. Th at unspoken abyss is race. Collins’s philosophical premise that the ordinary life story needs to be narrated without constant reference to race, although race is ever-present, sometimes determining, sometimes fl exible, results in fi lms that insist on connections between the internal—self—and the external—race (Collins 1984a). New York fi gures prominently again in Charles Lane’sA Place in Time and his later Sidewalk Stories (1989). Both titles signal the centrality of place to the fi lms. eTh opening epigraph of A Place in Time accepts the inevitability of the city as an agonist, evoking the “empty streets,” the “loneliness,” “the coldness” as a “part of our place in time.” In a street corner on a sidewalk by Astor Place in Broadway, an artist and a dancer try to eke a living. Both fi lms are shot in an extremely realistic style in black and white and recall the crispness of Walter Rutt mann’s city images in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). Th e anonymity of the city, its indiff erence to its inhabitants, is a chilling factor in the fi lms that reveal the human cost of this ethos; however, in paying homage to the silent cinema, particularly Charlie Chaplin, the fi lms also produce “humanistic” comedy (Mast and Kawin 2011). Th eir philosophy folds race into the other qualities that make the protagonist an artist and an outsider: his poverty, his homelessness, his kindness, his humor. Sidewalk Stories follows a street artist as he tries to survive in the city. Witnessing a murder, the artist takes the victim’s young child to safety and lives in
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various abandoned sites, becoming more and more involved with taking care of the child. Th at human contact in the isolation of the city suff uses the fi lm with joy, and even when race rears its ugly head, as it does when the artist takes the child to public facilities, he takes it in his stride. Ultimately, it is the loss of companionship that beats him down. Lane’s philosophical premises are closer to Collins than they are to Lee. Of the risk A Place in Time took with its inept, tramp protagonist, Collins said, “It took my breath away” (Collins 1984b: 17). Both Th e Cruz Brothers and the Lane fi lms celebrate the kind of alliances that can be forged across groups, whether of class or race. Th e male, single, homeless artist taking care of a child in Sidewalk Stories appears litt le short of completely unexpected as is the friendship in Th e Cruz Brothers between the wealthy, european american, octogenarian woman and the three hapless, Puerto Rican young men. Th e history of the New York Black Independents makes it clear that fi lmmaking was not an isolated activity; indeed, what distinguished the New York Black Independents was the range of inter-arts alliances in projects including drama, literature, painting, and photography. Th ey were also profi cient in the use of diverse formats such as video camera and alternate distribution channels, WNET New York Public Television being a primary outlet. Several of their fi lms had been made on shoestring budgets and had received some federal funding. “Translations” from literature to fi lm were also important, especially if the literary piece had resonated with audiences and touched on relevant topics. One such example of using dramatic or literary material is of Steve Carter’s play, “One Last Look,” a resource for Charles Hobson’s fi lm of the same name made in 1969. eTh play and fi lm, when set side by side with Collins’s plays and fi lms, show the commonalities across the New York Black Independents. One Last Look is about a family returning home for the funeral of their father to get some answers, to express their disappoint- ment, and to take stock of their lives. Th e father appears as a ghost and engages in continuous dialogue with them. Collins also uses the funereal gathering as a sett ing for her play, “Th e Brothers,”
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about a family coming together for the funeral of a family member, a world-famous athlete; the atmosphere and the conversation are quite similar to Carter’s play, speaking to the commonality of the theme. Both address the diffi culties of identity in the context of family history and ethnic community. Th e appeal of presenting Carter’s material from “One Last Look” on fi lm involves a move away from realism, and the director, Hobson, chances it. Similarly, Collins, almost ten years later, sett les on a non-realistic tale but goes further away for her source material—to a Jewish American writer, Henry Roth, for her fi lm on three Puerto Rican young men and their ghost father for Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy. As in the Carter play and the Hobson fi lm, “Poppa” interrupts continuously and refuses to die. Th e search for modes other than the realistic, then, was vital to these fi lmmakers in their desire to narrate the complexity of the lives of black subjects. Th e connections between artists is patent in the “meta-soap opera” Personal Problems (1980–1) directed by Bill Gunn but with freewheeling license for all to collaborate. Th is openness to suggestions and lack of emphasis on the sole authority of the director was shared by Collins, who encouraged the participa- tion of her cast and crew in the fi lming process. Ishmael Reed, the African American writer, was one of the producers, and in his notes on the Kino-Lorber release, he mentions that he traveled to DC to show it to staff members of PBS. Apparently, one staff member “disparaged” Bill Gunn and Kathleen Collins. Clearly, some of the New York Black Independents were associated with similar philosophies and aesthetics. Th e premise of Reed’s project was open-ended in that the producers wished to respond to the black community’s sense of itself, something that they were hungry to see. Reed’s questions were: “What happens when a group of unbankable individuals tell their stories? Actors who have fi nal say over their speaking parts? A director, who was found ‘too diffi cult’ for Hollywood?” Th e director that Reed is referring to is Bill Gunn (Reed [1980] 2018). Baldwin too had been expelled from Hollywood so there was some sense of urgency
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about countering Hollywood. Robert Polidori used ¾″ U-matic tapes, and allowed the fi lm to run aft er the scene was shot, using improvisation as a key aesthetic feature. Th e production history of Personal Problems is also illustrative of the links across media and artists among the New York Black Independents. Originally a radio soap opera, it had been funded by various local arts organi- zations and was recorded in producer Steve Cannon’s apartment (Reed [1980] 2018). Th e key features of the New York Black Independents can be summed up by (a) the diversity of formats and genres, (b) the richness of collaborations across artists of diff erent media, and (c) the depth of support among fi lmmakers and artists. Kathleen Collins’s fi lms illustrate the kind of arrangements Independents had to make. Stage actor Seret Scott played the female lead role in Losing Ground, Bill Gunn and Duane Jones, professional actors, played the two male roles. Other organizational elements were equally makeshift , and each production a war waged against huge budgetary constraints. Collins had considerable experience in commercial editing, and had also worked on Larry Neal’s 1969 May Be the Last Time (O’Malley 2019). Indeed, Kathleen Collins exemplifi ed the mixture of talent that comprised the New York Black Independents who were actors, directors, editors, musicians, camera-persons, sometimes all at the same time. An academic, a writer of short fi ction, a playwright with many plays behind her, author of fi lm criticism, skilled fi lm editor, Collins emerges as one of the central fi gures of the New York Black Independents.
Notes
1 Translation mine. 2 Th e series continues: a 2000 remake (dir. Singleton) and a 2019 fi lm with the same title (dir. Story).
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In the context of the US in the 1970s and 80s, the cinema-going public was, in general, not off ered fi lms that questioned the viewer’s monochromatic beliefs about the lives of black people. As a culture, while mainstream and black audiences engaged with illusionistic adventure fi lms, black independent fi lmmakers were making fi lms that in any other national cinema circles would be called New Wave. Films produced by the LA movement and the New York Black Independents belong to this group of fi lmmakers, who devised a new aesthetics to “see some aspects of black reality accurately portrayed on the screen” to counter Hollywood’s “blindness” (Mims 1990: 3). A cinema of ideas inevitably calls for a shift in the language of mainstream fi lm, whether it is at the level of the elements of fi lmmaking, the narrative trajectory, or the aesthetic modes that are used. Collins strives to achieve the precision of the writt en word in her narrative design, bending the language of cinema to philosophical use. A reviewer suggests that this aesthetic is reminiscent of the French New Wave’s ideological orientation. Commenting on Losing Ground, the reviewer identifi es a subtle but direct dialectic around an “intellectual university professor” as the fi lm’s “primary quality,” or its écriture (SD; translation mine). Yet, Collins’s fi lms, while similar in their eff orts to make the language “new” and in their overall literary impetus, are based on premises that are substantially diff erent from the corpus of a Rohmer or a Varda. Th e majority of French New Wave fi lms assume both the security of a post-World War II economy and the sett ledness
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of the western philosophical framework. Agnès Varda diff ers slightly in that she follows people marginal to mainstream bourgeois culture, vagabonds, migrants, artists. While Collins also reveals an abiding interest in outsiders, particularly women as outsiders, unlike Varda, she does not focus exclusively on eliciting knowledge about the individual but thinks through what it means to belong to a community of outsiders. Both are preoccupied with narrative structure as crucial to altering the stories we tell of women. Varda concentrates on multiple narrative perspectives that att empt to understand the gap between interiority and exteriority, as in Vagabond (1985). In her two fi lms,Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982), Collins retains the authenticity of the interior vision of her characters without allowing narrative to overcome the philosophical thread of the fi lm. Comparing Collins’s aesthetic to the French director she most admired, Éric Rohmer, also suggests some key diff erences. Take My Night with Maud (1969), one of the six moral tales Collins mentions as having had the greatest infl uence on her (Nicholson 1988/9). Th e running argument in the fi lm and the “conte,” or story, is over Pascal and his beliefs. Th e dialogue circles around the question of a moral choice. Th e male character, who appears to believe that his destiny is elected and therefore that his choices can only be moral, does not understand that subtlety in moral choice also lies in how one responds to the choice someone else has made. Th ese discussions are held very much within the context of beliefs in the elegant, ultimately mathematical world questioned by women but controlled by men. Th e fi lming is similarly polished and quiet in having no protuberances; the form following the belief that moral order, even when troubled, exists. Th e characters themselves may experience radiant, mystical fullness of being through their encounter with each other; however, their knowledge emerges from the depth of their belonging to that western philosophical tradition and their well-defi ned awareness of its contribution to humanity. Race, or even diff erence as such, is a non-factor, driving home the notion
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that humanness is defi ned by their knowledge of self and a sense of accord with someone akin to them as in the case with the protagonists of the fi lm. us,Th the fi lm is overtly philosophical in essaying an argument. An infl uential philosophical departure point for Collins is Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr ([1952] 1963). She understands his notion of the Christian “transformation of the sinner into the saint” to underlie the social imperative to construct sinners/outsiders; in the US context, African Americans, gays, lesbians, and other people forced to occupy the metaphysical place of the sinner, the social space of the outsider. Th e philosophical urgency for Collins, then, is to fi nd forms of “transformation” that do not divide the world into sinners and saints. To explore these pos- sibilities, she brings an entirely new set of philosophical references, and incorporates race within a world literature frame that includes, among others, Louis Mars, Jean Genet, African American folklore, and Puerto Rican popular culture (Collins 1984a). Th e abstractness of Collins’s fi lms results in plots that are both pinned to and unpinned from external and internal motivations alike. Th e title Losing Ground intimates that there will be no neat resolution, the plot ungrounded. Th e female hero, a philosophy professor, gives a lecture; she goes with her artist husband to upstate New York and acts in a fi lm that a student, George, makes. Th e pinning to the exterior is loosened by the absorption in the intensity of the protagonist’s interior life translated by the theatrical mise-en-scènes. Th e format that Collins uses invites us to see black characters outside of the blackface camoufl age, and Latinx characters within the national imaginary. It is not that the “look is returned” as in many subaltern fi lms. Th e Hegelian dialectic, a violence Irigaray fi nds innate to vision, is not apparent in Collins’s use of visuality as a trope in the diegesis (Irigaray 1985a). Equally importantly, she does not rely on the relay of looks to build her narrative. Th e bracketing of vision in feminist fi lm reveals the hostility of the medium to women as in Nelly Kaplan’s Th e Pirate’s Fiancée (1969) where the protagonist outrages the voyeur. Collins,
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however, amplifi es the possibilities of vision, augmenting the physicality of vision with the metaphysical. She achieves this meta-commentary on vision without taking recourse solely to the trajectory of looks but by lingering on the objects— painting and the printed word—that the characters look at. Consequently, the philosophical location of vision is detached from received imagery on African Americans. Th us, Collins appears to overwrite fi lm as the negative scene of instruction for African Americans. Music, the positive scene of instruction in African American culture, and auditory mechanisms amplify the thematic of existential exploration in relation to exterior conscriptions of what identity ought to entail, race, gender, and class affi liation (Wallace 1993b: 212). Identity in Cruz Brothers is explored through interactions with the other and with the ancestor. Victor, the oldest son in Cruz Brothers, listens to his father who talks only to him, giving him advice on how to survive in a world of white people whom one cannot trust.1 Th rough the course of the fi lms, the interior landscape is shown to be more important as the fi lms substitute the dilemma for the enigma, or the desire of the plot. Certainly, many Th ird Cinema fi lms are explicitly and self-consciously organized around the dilemma, whether of race or class, as in the Brazilian Cinema Novo and Glauber Rocha’s Cinema of Hunger, among others. While this holds for Collins’s fi lms, the infl ection, here, is on the dilemma of how to reconcile the interior landscape with the external ground. Sara’s research on the possibility of experiencing otherworldly ecstasy is obscure for a black woman living in the US in the 1980s. Victor of Th e Cruz Brothers is presented as a hustler turned ethnographer. Both fi lms do not off er resolutions, but the characters do have a mystical experience that aff ords them a greater understanding even when the diffi culties of everyday life persist. Collins’s approach to that intangible but all important task of rendering black and Latinx characters out of the various straitjack- ets into which they have been placed in US fi lm is achieved in a
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diff erent mode than the two great paradigms of African American fi lmmaking that Manthia Diawara identifi es, the expressive and the realist: the expressive organized around spatial narration, the realist temporal (Diawara 1993: 3–25). Collins uses elements from both paradigms, but the impact that both her fi lms make owes much to her incorporation of the other arts of theatre, painting, and music. Collins’s framework is philosophical in that her departure point is the questioning of the human subject, not the black human subject. Separating the two would seem to be grievous; an impossible fi ssion that she explores in all its facets of otherness from the self. Th e artist/intellectual is unabashedly at the center of her fi lms: the struggle of becoming a humanist artist and of gett ing to the bone of it without being marred by racial and gender barriers. Th e history of African Americans in mainstream US fi lm highlights the signifi cance of Collins’s ability to show black intellectuals and human subjects in environments other than the purposefully degrading. Both fi lms have mise-en-scènes that fl y in the face of other locations blacks are seen in, thus normalizing their right to inhabit artistic, intellectual aesthetic spaces. Seeing these characters in spaces that are luminous, such as the apartment Sara and Victor rent in upstate New York, defl ects the Cartesian and the european american viewer’s expectations of irreducible diff erence. Th e dialogue of Losing Ground interpolates the viewer when Victor mocks himself by saying that he is now a bonafi de “Negro success” because he has won an award. Th e lead character of the fi lm, Sara, again oversets expectations by not discussing her role as a black female intellectual but by talking about existential- ism to her students, and about the relationship between female desire and the intellect with her mother, herself an actor. Sara’s desire to desire, a trope in feminist fi lms, is startling because black women are invariably presented as entertainers, highly sexualized, and seductive when not playing the defeminized mammy role. Collins’s sense of over-arching universalism that allows her to use extreme performance elements without compromising the humanity of her characters exists in part because of a primary
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acknowledgment of others as human before bracketing them into categories of race, gender, or class and other elements that defi ne identity in much sharper lines. It is instructive to draw out the diff erences between universalism and cosmopolitan- ism. Post-structuralist discourse discredited the construction of the universal human subject in Enlightenment philosophy by enumerating the subjects the universal excluded: women, third world subjects, indigenous and black peoples. Consequently, the use of the term universal was jett isoned in academic writing, subaltern discourse preferring to locate identities within specifi c historical formations. While this was a much needed corrective, it excluded subaltern people from the category of the universal, handing it over to the west european white male. Th e multiplicity and specifi city of the many diff erences among people became de rigueur, dividing subaltern groups from drawing useful comparisons and claiming universal subjecthood for themselves. Kathleen Collins bridges these diff erences without sacrifi cing cultural or historical specifi city to restore the value of the universal in thinking of marginal subjects and their communities. Universalism continues to be generally dismissed for its political naïveté, with academics of diff erent stripes deploying cosmopolitanism as a category within which to understand identity formation in the context of racial and cultural diff erence. Over the last ten years “cosmopolitanism” has been quietly introduced as a new movement (Walkowitz 2006; Cheah and Robbins 1998). It could be argued that borrowings from many cultures, including the migrant and diaspora populations, comprise the cosmopolitanism of the metropolitan inhabitant, while metropolitan sett ings and the ease with which the stranger/ migrant/non-native traverses these constitute the non-native’s cosmopolitanism. Th is characterization is contested by “ethical” narratives of cosmopolitanism that address the notion of exchange between diverse cultures. Feminist understandings of cosmopolitanism and feminism have, in general, diverged from other received discourses on the
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same. Cosmopolitanism appears very oft en to be allied with other movements that lean towards the masculine, if not being dominated by it. Western defi nitions of cosmopolitanism, largely linked to modernity and modernism, place the male fl âneur at the center of this urban experience, with women signifying the cosmopolitan- ism of the urban but having restricted access to it. And despite the seemingly overarching sweep of the term, it means diff erent things across diff erent places. Very oft en the term is used as one of opposition to nationalism, as Gilroy defi nes it with reference to W. E. B. Du Bois, but as he himself concedes, Du Bois’s African sensibility and his rootedness in African American culture make the defi nition rather shapeless (Shelby and Gilroy 2008). In her novels, the South African writer Bessie Head very oft en aligns it with male modernity, as in Maru (1971) where the tribal chief wants to make radical changes in women’s conditions but without their consent and in his own interests. Unlike western critics of nationalism, Head does not believe that cosmopolitanism is less nationalistic; rather, it is more nationalistic by virtue of its post-colonial male foundation that excludes women and migrants, as in When the Rain Clouds Gather (1987). Whose cosmopolitanism? Male cosmopolitanism, whether it is in the global north or the global south. Universalism— across cultures, castes, races—is of greater value. Collins articulates this sentiment in her critique of Lorraine Hansberry. Pointing to Hansberry as a deep and lasting infl uence on her thinking and her work, Collins critiques Hansberry’s commentary for pigeon-holing her despite the richness and range of her writings. She expresses “shock” at Hansberry’s reach and says:
She had a really incredible sense of life that fascinates me. That anything in life was accessible for her to write about . . . Instead of feeling that the Black experience was the only experience that she could write about. And it is that breadth of vision that I have always sensed was ultimately my vision. (Nicholson 1988/9: 8)
Collins’s statement here and her conclusion that no other writer has matt ered so much to her is a hailing of Hansberry’s universalist
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approach to writing, based on Hansberry’s apprehension of life. For Collins, such scope, which she pinpointed as being derived from world literature, was her natural habitation as artist. Th e choice then was less between what is now termed post-racial art and racial art than between cosmopolitanism and universalism. Universalism prompted her choice of characters, key to her representational practices that absorbed realism, modernism, and magical realism. Th at Collins was not wedded to received understanding of “realistic” representations of black and minority subjects does not imply a movement away from black politics. She regarded the question of whether fi lm should be political or artistic as largely extraneous, stating that her fi lms were political with a small “p,” recognizing the political dimensions of the ethical and the aesthetic, in form as much as in content (Franklin 1981: 33). Th e reach for the universal in lieu of the cosmopolitan is seen in the themes of Th e Cruz Brothers. Writt en by a Jewish American author, the story is about three Puerto Rican youths who are anything but cosmopolitan, and their interaction with an Irish American lady living in a grand house belonging to a bygone era. Collins tracks slowly through the sleepy upstate New York town in its determined, close-eyed whiteness and purposefully juxtaposes this by placing the wealthy New York socialite with the three barely working-class, hoop-playing boys in the crumbling interior of her mansion. She contrasts this mise-en-scène with the place the boys occupy, and yet the eff ect is not Eisensteinian; rather, it is to trace a universal line between characters whose social circumstances are dramatically diff erent. Th e sequences in the house are shot with an aura of wonder, and do not exude the slightest whiff of the tawdry. Th e use of magical realism in these sequences is very light, but it is suffi cient to suggest a connection in the real that links the characters and validates all of them in diff erent ways. Like Cruz Brothers, Losing Ground shows the appeal of the universal, but it also sharply critiques a pretentious cosmopolitanism when Sara, in an uncharacteristic rage, accuses Victor, her artist husband, of invoking and exploiting cosmopoli- tanism for his own libidinal interests.
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Figure 2.1 Cruz Brothers: The brothers in Miss Malloy’s house
Collins’s humanist framework that I call “universalism” distin- guishes her from other cultural critics of the 1980s and 90s. For many, the category of universalism obviated the black experience, subsuming the black subject. Such indeed is the perspective of Du Cille’s comments on the use value of black women’s literature for european american feminist critics. According to her, the suff ering and oppression of black women resonates with non-black women, who are encouraged and supported by the endurance of black women as revealed in black women’s literature “to rise above not necessarily the pain of black women but of their own” (Du Cille 1994: 622). Du Cille has some objections to what could be regarded as an old trope in US literary history: the validation or authoriza- tion of black experience through the prism of white humanity:
The griefs of African American women indeed seem to grieve on universal bones—“to concretize and make vivid a system of oppression.” But it also seems (and herein lies the rub) that in order to grieve “universally,” to be “concrete,” to have “larger meaning,” the fl esh on these bones ultimately must always be white or male. (Du Cille 1994: 622)
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Within this genealogy Collins is diff erent in not insisting on specifi city but demanding a universality for black subjects, their existence as overreaching narrow social and representational straits. Th e two points of view are not in contention with each other; I bring up Du Cille’s argument merely to accent Collins’s vision, which is unlike that of the binaries that doxa assumes. Where Du Cille believes that the specifi c is being nullifi ed to contribute to a “false” universal—in actuality, a specifi c that is appropriated—Collins’s struggle is to redeem the universal for the specifi c and to reinstate the universal in lieu of the cosmopolitan. Collins’s demand for an absolute universal for the black subject is not in and of itself a radical principle but becomes one when black subjects and their stories enter public discourse from assigned places to off er grist to the humanist mill. Black and third world feminist criticism was to point out the phenomenon by which all third world texts—and many, such as bell hooks, would argue that black texts in the US are third world texts—were treated as raw material to be turned into fi nished goods by the western theory mills (Ramanathan and Schlau 1995). In this, hooks’s conclusion is no diff erent than Du Cille’s suspicion of the universal, but for Collins the fi lmmaker, dramatist, and writer of fi ction, it was imperative to create that speaking space for her subjects that would be universal (hooks 1995) Th e representational space aff orded to black artists and painters by the critical community’s persistent hailing of race was oblivious to diff erences across race, demanding an “authenticity” that tiresomely depended on US whiteness as the ultimate referent. Black artists of that time resisted that idea, recognizing that the limits placed on authentic blackness to (realistic) representation of black subjects would inhibit the invention/creation of a black tradition (Mercer 1994; hooks 1995). Collins acknowledges that historically black women are diff erent from white women, but she is hesitant to decide on that basis alone on the defi nitiveness of a common black aesthetic:
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I would think that there is a Black aesthetic among Black women fi lmmakers. Black women are not white women by any means; we have diff erent histories, diff erent approaches to life, and diff erent attitudes. Historically, we come out of diff erent traditions; sociologically, our preoc- cupations are diff erent. However, I have a lot of trouble with this question because I do not feel there has been a long enough tradition. (Reid 1993: 122)
Th e specifi city of a black aesthetic, a black modernism, and black performativity are each separate and linked minefi elds. eTh black aesthetic has been linked variously to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and fi lms such as Looking for Langston (dir. Julien, 1989). Th e earliest version of black modernism features black culture, oral arts, and literature in black expressive language, including the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer, to name only a few. Th e 1960s movement was “radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienated him from his community,” and there was a strong belief that the aesthetics revealed the artist’s ethics (Neal 1968: 28). Black performativ- ity with reference to the post-60s movement used mimicry to hollow out received blackness and to fi nd new forms of expressive blackness. Th e latt er has a lot in common with postmodern inter- pretations of black visual culture. However, Collins off ers a black aesthetic that is more amorphous; nevertheless, it has its roots in the Black Arts tradition that sought links to the third world, and the 1980s black modernist art that similarly had connections with the third world, and the African diaspora in particular. Her work is based on her own cultural experiences but also her aspirations for the universality of the black subject. Th e notion of black performance, while peculiarly a device and a trope in both her fi lms, is to be distinguished from black performativity as parody; rather, black performance is elevating in the sense of bringing the actor to her/his existential self. Given the richness of drama during the Black Arts period, and Collins’s work as a
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playwright, it stands to reason that she viewed performance as a mode to arrive at the everyday experiences of black and minority subjects. Collins’s substantial dramatic oeuvre and her fi ction is vital in showing her connections with a black women’s literary movement in the 1980s and centers black women’s communities and dialogues among black women, unfolding an almost exclusively black community. Working within a world cinematic and literary tradition that is capacious lends Collins elements of her universalist philosophy. She is, for instance, an admirer of Gabriel García Márquez and has been emphatic about her singular devotion to Rohmer. Th e att ention to language is the draw here. Collins contends that she is a “moralist,” paying att ention to the crucial but seemingly “slight moral issues” that one encounters in daily life (Kathleen Collins qtd in Okiti 2016: 38). In Losing Ground, Victor is confronted with the moral choice of discounting the concerns of a black female intellectual, who is also his wife, or giving her ideas serious consideration. “Emotional truth” and “purity” are important concepts for Collins, demanding as they do self-scrutiny and a certain authenticity in one’s actions. Th e Cruz brothers are confronted with just such a moral choice when they meet a rich New Yorker who asks them to help refurbish her house. Are they to treat her as though she were nuts, or with dignity and respect without condescension? More importantly, they must feel this “emotional fact,” or truth, not just play-act for decency’s sake (Sara Rogers qtd in Okiti 2016: 38). Collins’s Weltanschauung was framed by her belief that the world was organized around the dichotomy of the saint and the sinner. Using Sartre’s biography on Genet, she contends that social metaphysics requires sinners. Blacks have been defi ned as sinners, a trope that is extremely well realized in Genet’s Th e Blacks, which covers passing, the Other, detachment from the body, and shock over the ludicrousness of color. In the metaphysical scheme Collins describes, it is important to project sinfulness onto an other, and to contrast the extra-ordinary evil of the sinner to the equally exaggerated holiness of the saint. Above all, Collins
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wishes to move people outside this framework and to arrive at a “normalcy,” an “ordinariness” that she believes black people are denied. Neither fi lm is constructed around the elevated drama of calamity, nor even the grandeur of tragedy where there is an extraordinary fall (Collins 1984a). Th ere are moments of truth and redemption in both fi lms: in the discoveries of Victor inCruz Brothers and Sara in Losing Ground (Collins 1984a). Redemption is of course an element aft er the anagnorisis or recognition in tragedy. Here, the characters do not need to fall from a loft y height. Another way of philosophizing this “ordinariness” would be to suggest that Collins is looking to a “postcategorical utopia that is an impulse towards a world where the oppressive eff ects of identity categories” would not be the primary means of ascertaining one’s humanity (Kilpeläinen 2012: 2).2 However, Collins’s ideas have litt le to do with the more conventional, loosely postmodern avoidance of grand narratives that the post-racial seems to signal. For Collins, race as a notional entity was very observable; the task was to unravel that notionality, and in her writing and fi lms, she was able to write about characters who were aware of it, and to off er a range of responses, all of which she presents as humane and universal (Collins 2019). Collins’s rendition of what I am calling the “black essai” fi lm exceeds the limits of the French essai fi lm, and the black independents. One critic, in att empting to suggest diff erences between African American woman fi lmmakers of the 1980s and onwards, notes very pointedly that despite the fact that these women were college educated and the products of the civil rights moment, they did not feature black individuals pursuing college but journeyed into the past, into slavery. Among the fi lmmakers included in that study are Julie Dash, Euzhan Palcy, and Maureen Blackwood (Ryan 2005). To the contrary, Collins did show two individuals in Losing Ground who are very much part of an intellectual world. Th e motif of blackness as essence or essential heritage does not obtain with Collins as it may in these other fi lms. Nevertheless, even as the “ancestral archive” seems of litt le specifi c importance to Sara inLosing Ground, she is very open
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to the “universal archive” and is invested in experiences that are not limited to the defi nable. In that aspect, the “double vision” unatt ributed to a specifi c black essence but very loosely att ributed to a specifi c black epistemological project, not exclusively identity, cannot be gainsaid, whether it is Losing Ground’s Sara’s att empts to explore her intellectual identity with respect to an abstract notional racial mountain, or Victor’s confl icts with his absent/ present father in Cruz Brothers about how Puerto Ricans in New York are expected to behave. Critical reception of Collins’s fi lms has been att uned to their emphasis on interiority and hapticity, including their philosophical orientation, but problematic in not registering that the intellectual is central to her vision of the universal. However, the premise that the body untrammeled by race fosters the creation of a “metaphysical space” outside of the “intellectual,” even if marked by “aff ect,” boxes Collins into the very category of essence, even when this is designated as “post- black,” not “post-racial” (Beverly 2012). Any overt rejection of the intellectual, or the idea that the intellectual does not include the “aff ect” or that the intellectual is solely rational misses the crux of the interior confl ict inLosing Ground, where the female intellectual is denigrated for being intellectual and is challenged, by a male, to be essentially more “female.” Th us, the philosophical challenge the fi lm faced was to develop the idea of a female intellectual. Th e ostensible plot confl ict in the fi lm between the male and the female is played out on masculine ground. Th e male artist, without any nuance of hesitation or self-doubt, assumes that the artist’s being and experience are ultimate, echoing the Aristotelian dictum about creativity and masculinity. Paradoxically, this point of view diminishes the intellectual when it is aligned with the female hero, for in her it is associated with rigidity and the lack of ability to be expressive. Sara feels self-doubt as a consequence of Victor’s charges of in- fl exibility; however, it does not inhibit her from studying the “Ecstatic Experience.” Collins’s narrative scheme connects the intellectual to the expressive; the female hero’s journey results
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in her linking the two. Th e male modernist artist in the diegesis appears decoupled from the intellectual even as the female intellectual incorporates the expressive. Th e fi lm follows the protagonist’s search for ecstasy; “transport” and “rapture” are approximate synonyms. “Transport” is close to ecstasy except that the emotion it elicits is specifi ed as “violent.” “Rapture,” while heavily contaminated today by the fundamental- ist use of the term, has mystical infl exions, as defi ned byWebster’s New Collegiate Dictionary: “Etymologically a seizing, in earlier use implied a lift ing of the mind or soul by divine power, so that it might see things beyond the range of human vision.” Th at Sara, as an intellectual, seeks to research the diverse experiences of ecstasy would appear to be anomalous, but it is in keeping with the desire of the narrative to expand the boundaries of the western intellectual quest. Very few feminist fi lms or African American fi lms, or indeed very few fi lms at all, feature a female in search of ecstasy, inspiring one reviewer to express gratitude for this “recognition of intellectual ecstasy that is profoundly rare in the realm of ideas” (SD; translation mine). Collins’s route to the protagonist’s ecstasy is through western and African philosophical thought, African American literature, and avant-garde fi lm. She sets up philosophical propositions only to move away from them to other more complex statements that are universalist, rather than unitary, and specifi c. The fi lm, in conjunction with the metafi lm, proposes the inclusion of African gnosis to the western philosophy of the professor’s classroom. Th e insistence on ways of knowing beyond the scopic, of knowing through the body, but not only through the body, serves as a feminist counterweight to western metaphysics. Th e discussion on otherness started in the lecture hall continues in the library, gliding smoothly into the conver- sational exchange on ecstasy: a rare debate in the history of ideas, even rarer in fi lm. eTh two mise-en-scènes that seem to demarcate the boundaries of knowledge—the lecture hall, and the library—are later shown to be insuffi cient as Sara absorbs crucial knowledge on ecstasy in the fi lm set. In the library, Sara
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is reading with the utt er absorption of one in a trance when she is interrupted by a stranger who wants to know what she is reading. When she tells the man, Duke, that she is writing a paper on “Ecstatic Experience,” he wants to know whether it is from a theological standpoint. Aft er their discussion on St. Th eresa and the Gnostics’ understanding of ecstasy, Sara advances her thesis that the “religious boundaries around ecstasy are too narrow.” Duke, in turn, points out that the Christians are too restrictive regarding a human being’s intuition. Duke also introduces the psychic dimension when he suggests that the Gnostics had that “orientation.” Th e Gnostics’ belief in knowledge as emancipatory is not entirely satisfying to Sara, who later visits a psychic, in essence to fi nd out about herself. Both Duke and Sara reject the theological as the only dimension to provide an avenue to ecstasy; Sara’s thesis includes the notion that “artists, for example, have frequent ecstatic experiences.” Sara opts for a broader defi nition of the divine, one that involves a certain kind of possession, where the other is folded into the self, diff erent from perhaps the grace off ered by religious vision. Christian vision then is divisive, demanding a self and an other, a demarcated subject and object. Irigaray theorizes that vision, as distinct from hapticity, emphasizes the whatness of seeing, the object to be seen, in place of a mingling (Irigaray 1985a). Th e ideal of ecstasy modeled on vision is not suited to a philosophy professor who, despite her husband’s slurs, is passionate and intuitive about a seemingly “rational” fi eld, apologizing neither for her intellectualism, nor for her femininity and intuitive- ness. Possession, in Christian terms, is usually a negative term. However, in African and eastern mystical traditions, it is a vital part of a mystical experience, whether religious or not. Collins was well acquainted with the Haitian vaudun tradition, and had translated Louis Mars’s book on the various stages of possession. Mars’s treatise is detailed, not just in the practice but in the precise and careful stages in each of the levels of possession. Th e vaudun was equally part of the African American cultural tradition; for instance, Zora Neale Hurston, the anthropologist
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and writer, had traveled to Haiti, immersed herself in the practice of vaudun, and had writt en a book on it, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938). Collins would have known not only about Hurston’s work but also of the avant-garde fi lmmaker Maya Deren’s exalted experiences with vaudun in Haiti, published in 1953. Although these texts are not named in the fi lm, Collins pulls from these archives to universalize philosophy by expanding the research on ecstasy. She synthesizes her ideas on the possibili- ties of ecstasy for a black intellectual woman by staging the dance/ fi lm/performance of her protagonist experiencing something close to being “beyond oneself.” Th e fi lm within the fi lm features the philosophy professor playing the role of a vaudeville performer, Frankie, and her lover and dance partner, Johnny. Th e motif itself is drawn from African American folklore. Th e fi nal shot of the fi lm is both diegetic and extra-diegetic, showing us Sara’s husband, Victor, looking at Sara, even as we and Victor see Sara in the throes of a powerful concerted emotion, as Sara blows Johnny away. Th e audience intuitively understands that Victor too has been blown away. Th e act has an inevitability that rises to the tragic, and is in part a reprisal of an African American fi lm,Carmen Jones, featuring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. In that fi lm, Carmen pursues Joe, acquires every kind of emotional power over him, and then wishes to abandon him. Joe, in violent despair, strangles her. Th e fi lm within the fi lm reinscribes that melodrama, with the roles reversed but only in some aspects. While Joe is shot in terrifyingly bleak close-ups, and close-ups of Carmen reveal her plight, here, Sara, as Frankie, is composed, with Johnny not having a clue as to what is occurring. Th e fi lms diff er in that Carmen Jones follows in a long line of dramatic and literary male protagonists killing women. Th e violence in Losing Ground is enclosed in the extra-diegetic: Frankie shoots Johnny; Sara does not shoot Victor. Where the revenge motif may be suffi cient to demand for women the right to passion, even if violent, the extra-diegetic sequence accrues signifi cance only because of the doubling
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Figure 2.2 Losing Ground: Playing the role of Frankie
Figure 2.3 Carmen Jones: “I could have been another Dorothy Dandridge.” Sara in Losing Ground
of Sara as Frankie. Th e use of the term “doubling” may be distracting. Aft er all, do not all actors assume another role? Yes, they do, but not usually when they are already acting in a fi lm. Parallels to the diegetic in the meta-dramatic or metafi lmic
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Figure 2.4 Carmen Jones: Violence against women
usually have the function of alerting both characters in the diegesis and the audience of a skein of action or thought not foregrounded in the diegesis. Sara’s passion, regarded as such only by her students, is accentuated through the role of Frankie. Consequently, the doubling motif, a staple in some early silent Expressionist fi lms, works to reveal Sara to herself and others, including the audience. Th e motif of the double, widely used to depict the thematic of the modernist split self in early fi lms such as Max Mack’sTh e Other (1913), generally touches on male existential dilemmas. Th e early Th e Student of Prague (dir. Rye, 1913), featuring the male double, reveals that the subject of the fi lm itself is metaphysical. Further, the male double in this fi lm is reduced to nothingness, marking the inviolate integrity, the sovereign autonomy of the male subject that was threatened. From having an identity as a seeker of knowledge, the student loses himself so entirely that he cannot physically see himself in a mirror, thus erasing all connections to the substantial. For the female, doubling is not so much a matt er of despair as it is of extending the boundaries of the self. In an early Asta Nielsen fi lm,Th e Abyss (dir. Gad, 1910), the double aff ords the middle-class woman sexuality, freedom, and access to modernity. Sara’s double in the student project fi lm carries the same powerful surge towards a more complicated identity. Where
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these early fi lms did not actually allow any reconciliation of the doubles, it is patent that doubling in Losing Ground does allow the protagonist to be herself and to move beyond herself. Possessed, in a manner, but by an other that is welcome. Although the plot problem, or the relationship problem between husband and wife, is not resolved, the fi lm does point to some new directions in which to think of the notion of ecstasy for women. Th e inclusion of universalism as an important component in black thought, and the defi nition of black female intellectualism expand the genres of the european and African American essai fi lms alike.
Notes
1 Victor is the name of the oldest brother in Cruz Brothers and the name of Sara’s husband in Losing Ground. Th e name’s connotations are apparent. 2 Kilpeläinen (2012) uses this term to discuss Baldwin’s later work; I have borrowed the term “postcategorical” but not followed Kilpeläinen in her suggestion that identity categories would “dissolve.”
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 5050 112/10/192/10/19 10:4110:41 AMAM 3 Ambiguities of auteurship
Th e auteur theory, popular in the late 1980s despite male post- structural demurrals, was repressed, and resurfaced in the early 2000s. Th eories of auteurship remain important for fi lmic traditions outside the mainstream industries, and for women. Indeed, many new studies att empt to situate auteurs within an international frame; however, black fi lmmakers have had reservations about the traditional model. Derived from two sources, one literary, the other fi lmic, the institutional defi nition for classical male fi lm auteurship focuses on the proprietary control of the director over the object of art. Since D. W. Griffi th’s eff orts to legitimize fi lm, fi lm has engaged in several conscious and unconscious eff orts to integrate, incorporate, and invalidate its older, more prestigious, rival sister, literature (Peucker 1995). Th e other source derives from Truff aut’s rallying cry against the mett eurs-en-scène of French cinema who, he claimed, did not appreciate the true versatility of the fi lmic medium but inevitably made it subservient to the dramatic arts. He himself was deeply enamored of American fi lm, particularly the legendary Alfred Hitchcock with his insistent cameo appearances, which literalized the auteurial gesture in fi lm and established legal “ownership” over a series of fi lms (Silverman 1992). Membership of the auteurial club was confi ned to those whose aesthetic style was recognized, as in literary texts, across a body of work. Th e high masculine defi nition eff ectively blocked many women and all minorities from entrance into this exclusive club.
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Alternate models of auteurship
African American critics are ambiguous about the value of an auteur-driven cinema. Although some critics welcomed the fi lms of the LA School for integrating the black vernacular and the blues aesthetic in their work, others questioned the newfound respect granted to these fi lms in restricted art and university circles: “But does not that limited success mask and cushion the lack of success in its stated aim—to reach the black community in ways that advance self-defi nition through cinematic self-examination?” (Taylor 1995: 434). Th e fear is that the fi lms do not speak to wider black audiences and remain “curiosities.” However, yet others believe that such criticism becomes an implicit demand that black fi lms fi t into the Hollywood paradigm, which, they justly claim, would only appropriate the black vernacular to its own ends as Blaxploitation fi lms had done, following Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Francis 2007). Notwithstand- ing divergent opinions, it is clear that both the LA Independents and the New York Black Independents produced a body of fi lms that belong to the auteur tradition that stretches back to the work of Oscar Micheaux of the silent era. Feminist fi lm critics have fairly consistently placed a premium on auteurship, starting with key texts on Dorothy Arzner in the 1980s to theorize “counter-cinema,” and then developing insti- tutional approaches to women’s fi lmmaking as with Margarethe Von Trott a and other German women fi lmmakers. Drawing from, but departing from, the stylistic centering of feminist auteur studies, critics in the 2000s have maintained that feminist auteurship revolves around the fi lm’s ideological establishment of the authority of the female. Many of these analyses focused on the manner in which feminist fi lm was successful in subverting the male gaze produced by a masculine cinematic apparatus. Trajectories of looking have received less att ention from black feminist critics, who have directed us to a white national imaginary that renders black women invisible, or that reinscribes white male fantasies of black women on screen.
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Dominant feminist theories about the male gaze do not obtain as black female directors like Dash, Chadha, Cheryl Dunye, and Amma Asante suggest that black female invisibility on screen, the default mode when they are not fetishized, denies black women femininity (Ramanathan 2006: 45–77). While these ideas have been circulating among black cultural critics, mainstream feminist theorization excludes these considerations, ultimately equating the term “women” with european american women (Hollinger 2012: 230–47). Dishearteningly, despite the writings on international women’s fi lm and third world women’s fi lm, none of the international/ comparative/third world critics fi gure, as do very few directors, obscuring the long history of women’s independent fi lmmaking, and defi ning “women’s fi lm” and their auteurship in routine terms that sidestep the possibility of more inclusive defi nitions of women’s fi lm and auteurship (Badley et al. 2016: 1–23). Th e inclusion of Collins’s work in a feminist genealogy of fi lms encourages us to reconsider the very real importance of women’s visibility, in this instance black women’s visibility in the public space outside the routing of the male (white) gaze. Collins returns to the literary and integrates the philosophical to confer both authority and visibility in the diegesis on her black and minority characters. Paradoxically, while not fi tting into models of male fi lm auteurship, Collins does have some kinship with the earliest notion of auteurship, propounded by Alexandre Astruc, of the “caméra- stylo.” Instances of writing in a fi lmic text are powerful indications of the auteur’s insignia (Fischer 2013). Losing Ground’s opening features the protagonist writing on the whiteboard, and later she is seen typing an essay. Although such writing seems to insert the proprietary right of the director, like the post-structuralists, Collins was acutely aware of the linguistic discursive, particularly in the making of a fi lm. Consequently, for her, the text would not be att ached exclusively to a private vision of the director. A feminist fi lm theorization on auteurship rests on Collins’s universalist world view and her registration of the authority of minority and black subjects in the diegesis.
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For women directors, as mentioned earlier, the self-fashioning of the female subject in the diegesis was a route to establishing female auteurship. Black fi lm directors, preoccupied with the national cultural imaginary of the black community, had to fi nd a route to universalism that did not center the individual subject. Philosophically, there was no precedent for the black individual’s experience to have universal relevance, as distinct from white subjects for whom this was normative. Th us, although white women may have been excluded from the normative universal, their access to it in fi lm was not blocked by a massif of blankness as was the case with black subjects with reference to visuality. As African Americans in fi lm do not have the prerogative of “white looking power,” and were denied visibility and presence in fi lm, the introduction of the idea of black self-representation on screen was imperative, trumping traditional proprietary gestures. Th us, while european american fi lmmakers and black fi lmmakers confront comparable dilemmas, the specifi city of race in the visual scene renders the trope of multiple black self-representations crucial to the registration of authority in the visual fi eld. Like other black fi lmmakers, such as Lee and Gunn, Collins introduces characters who represent themselves; moreover, she develops an expanded debate on self-representation in her fi lms. Collins does not sett le on a single surrogate who would serve as a substitute but distributes the surrogate function liberally, limiting the traditional authority of the auteur but expanding that of a range of characters through their access to self-representation or authorship of various kinds. In her writings and in her fi lms, Collins’s auteurial signature is manifest by way of both male and female auteurial surrogates. She combines the use of the literary, the visual, and the techniques of fi lm to amplify their authority partly by expressing their refl ectiveness on how they inhabit space, how they live in time, and how they understand and work with language to know themselves. Th emes of the artist, her/his interiority, and her/his desire pervade all of her work. Both her fi lms feature portraits of artists as do all her writings. In a very real sense, Collins is very much in
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search of the forms of creativity that Alice Walker suggests are so important to grasping the complex everyday continuity of black women’s creativity in their communities. Walker explores the notion of what the creative process might have been like without the stockpile of amplifi ed male, and the more restricted euro- american female, literary tradition. In a deliberate move, she strikes out Virginia Woolf’s questions about how a sixteenth- century British woman of talent must have felt to substitute how a woman (“born or made a slave”) would feel (Walker 1983: 231–43). Dunye later was to refl ect on this theme with regard to fi lm in Watermelon Woman (1996). Collins responds to the question of specifi city in tradition, whether literary or cinematic, by emphasizing the universal of the outsider expressing oneself, regardless of the form. For Collins, the language of the story bridged all art forms. And in direct response to Walker’s question of how a talented woman of slave extraction might feel, she features a range of creative forms in her work. Like Walker, she insistently registers the creativity and the authority that each of her characters has, a function of her belief in multiple forms of creative expression. Collins’s ability to excavate the imaginations of her characters ensures a genealogical connection in the black community, brought to the fore by the actors and their own glimpses of history. And fi lm for her was about using language to articulate these imaginings as an author might, if with materials other than pen and paper (Collins 1984a; Nicholson 1988/9). Invested in bringing the linguistic richness of literature to fi lm, Collins sought to incorporate diverse idioms in her fi lms. Collins herself stresses that she is a craft sperson, and that as a skilled editor of many years and a fi lm instructor for seven years, she wanted to acquire a “language” to be able to tell stories with a twist. She specifi cally chooses the Roth story because of its appeal but almost more so because of its distance from her own life and her writing (Franklin 1981: 31). Collins was known for encouraging her actors to improvise. In translating a story from Henry Roth’s Th e Cruz Chronicle to the screen, Collins worked with José Machado to reshape the
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character and gestures of Felipe, the brother most reluctant to work for the eccentric Miss Malloy in Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy. In this fi lm, an older, wealthy, New York woman enlists the young Cruz brothers to restore her house to its former glory, off ering them a fantastic salary. Felipe is suspicious, and unlike his characterization in the Roth story where he is largely a stupefi ed brute, here he is funny in his chagrin, and physically plastic, showing a vulnerability that is not patent in the Roth short story. Collins maintained that she relied on professional actors to follow through with action and character cues, thus involving them in lending texture to the “vision” of the fi lm. isTh would seem to be as distant from any claims of auteurship as possible, and indeed a canceling of it. Th e two principles that guide her work are at the crux of the auteur motif: her insistence on language, and her conviction that she needed to do stories whereby no one was “manipulated” (Collins [1980] 2015). Her narrative design then is based on allowing characters to tell their own stories, a series of linked focalizations att esting to the universal relevance of each story. Collins avoids omniscient narration, and devises strategies that would enable the subjects to play a part in telling their stories. Th e language and techniques used to narrate the stories are inevitably “manipulated” but the characters are not. Author/ artist fi gures litt er her fi lms demanding that the viewer scrutinize the transparency of the narration to ascertain whether story and character are slanted. Th at the artist fi gure is central in all her texts att ests to the importance of insider/self-representation in the telling of black/minority narratives, a priority, given the skewed nature of the cultural repository of blackness.
Narrative authority
Th e trope of ownership over representation occurs in other black independent fi lm, including Spike Lee’s laterJoe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop (1983). Houston Baker argues that despite the young black photographer’s understanding that blacks should control
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their own images, he participates in an economy of white desire whereby his photography of a black female calendar model articulates a secondary desire, responding to a primary white desire for black bodies as coin. Th e photographer’s artistic creation is, to some extent, a cannibalization of the self at the cost of the female, feeding white desire (Baker Jr. 1993: 154–77). Th e commodifi ca- tion of black narratives, their production for other (white) desires, is actively contested by Victor’s investment in recording his life for himself, a valuation of the self in Th e Cruz Brothers. Sara in Losing Ground embarks on several creative projects that are responsive to her desire for fulfi llment as an intellectual and a human being. A philosopher critic, she is entrusted with interpreting bodies of knowledge for the next generation, ensuring the continuation of the species as thinkers. Her research on ecstasy is to fi nd out if she can experience extreme states, and to nourish herself. And when she acts in the student’s fi lm, it is to seek out diff erent dimensions for herself. Feminist fi lm has fl irted with the trope of the female artist; for example, Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002) and Agnès Merlet’s Artemisia (1998), but the abstract premise at the center of Collins’s two narrative fi lms is unusual in its location of creativity as authority in fi lm. African American fi lm too has made serious gestures towards the black subject as scientifi c intellectual inGanja and Hess (dir. Gunn, 1973), and as everyday philosopher in Killer of Sheep (dir. Burnett , 1977). Granting that the subjects in the fi lms actively refrain from fi tting into a received cultural placement, the space itself is continuous, making it diffi cult to void the unequal relationship of blacks to the dominant spaces of the white world. Th e refl ections of the subjects are likewise burdened by the weight of the knowledge that free thinking is itself time stolen. In Th e Cruz Brothers, that dis-ease in space is totally absent; instead, we encounter the imperceptible feeling of ease when the Cruz brothers dance, wobble, and run across a trip wire on the bridge, playing, rather than performing. Th e sequence, while seemingly realistic, conjures up what Alejo Carpentier in the
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1920s described as the marvelous real of the Americas that unlike surrealism, or expressionism, was ontologically real but could occur only in this new world (Carpentier 2006). In the sequence where the brothers highstep it across the trip wire, with only the sky above them and the lush greenery of upstate New York around them, their lives are imbued by a rare, isolated magic, almost as though they were the fi rst to be here. Shades of Macondo in New York State. Henry Roth, the author of Th e Cruz Chronicle that the fi lm is based on, wished very much to do “an American version of a Hundred Years of Solitude” (Roth commentary in Collins [1980] 2015). Many of the stories in the collection skirmish with unusual or inexplicable occurrences; the fi lm fl eshes out a single story in a sustained, and North American, magical realist mode. Locating black/minority subjects in this world that is not exclusively bound to white authority enables Collins to establish black/minority intellectual authority in fi lm. Th e opening sequence of Cruz Brothers illustrates this auteurial combination of the family romance of magical realism, insider narration in an epic frame. Th e voice over of the narrator is unnamed, but it is implied that it could be the ghost father of young Victor, who very deliberately records his impressions of the town. When the fi lm opens, it appears that the male voice over narrator will ultimately exert a certain magisterial authority over the narrative, almost as though it were a chronicle foretold, but such is not the case, showing how Collins works with the mode of magical realism but with the intent of leaving possibilities open. In the urtext of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the last of the Buendía family reads of their life as told by Melquíades, writt en in the sacred language of Sanskrit. In contrast, in the fi lm, the father/ghost, the ancestral presence, which is a recurring feature of the collective auteurship of black women, is ineff ectual here, providing a counterpoint from which to read Victor’s own creative enterprise of recording his thoughts in a litt le machine (Ryan 2005). In a mise-en-cadre, shortly aft er Victor and his two brothers have returned home, we see Victor handling the tape and talking to “Poppa.” Victor, whom Poppa
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calls the “family historian,” uses the tape machine as an auditory record that subtly lends Cruz Brothers the diary fi lm dimension. Indeed, the machine and the tapes, predating the cassett e format, appear to hold the sheer joy of the discovery of ice in the opening of One Hundred Years. Victor’s taping process also recalls the arcane secrecy practiced in Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s private laboratory where he retreated to explore the mysteries of science. In her commentary aft er the screening of the fi lm, Collins said that she was “toying with myth/fantasy; illusion/truth” (Collins [1980] 2015). A wry moment in the fi lm when Victor tries to prise all these apart in a humorous challenge to himself and to us is when he holds the dinky tape recorder out to Poppa and asks him to speak into it, raising the question of whether Poppa’s ghostly voice can leave material traces. Th rough much of the fi lm, Victor carries the authority of the player on stage who holds the audience in his grip with his soliloquies because, of course, we only hear Poppa, we never see him. Victor’s conversations with Poppa and into the tape recorder then show only him in the frame, leaving him with a grip over the narrative, even as he is extremely vulnerable as he reveals himself to his tape recorder and struggles with the family ghost who tries to curb his adventures. Poppa is not as culpable as José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch of the Buendía family, but he certainly leaves the brothers in the lurch when he is shot during a botched bank heist. And while the Cruz brothers start out with a bungled hotwiring att empt, thanks to Victor’s ability to communicate with people outside the Puerto Rican community, they move outside their own narrow territory. Th e opening sequence also shows how Collins insists on her subjects having some control over their space. In feminist fi lm, one of the key visual breakthroughs occurs when we begin to see female protagonists not confi ned to certain domestic spaces but taking command over the open spaces. A classical case in point is Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933), which shows a trouser-wearing Katharine Hepburn blazing her way through the city in a motorbike, striding across open ground, and ultimately swallowing up miles in the sky during her around-the-world fl ight.
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Collins shows Victor’s measurement of the spaces around him in a manner that interposes his perspective of the town, pre-empting any suggestion of trepidation about access to the space. As Victor speaks of the town in amused tones, with more than a slight tinge of irony about its whiteness and shabbiness, various street scenes are interspersed, authenticating his running commentary. A wavy tracking shot of the camera moving from right to left while the cars move in the other direction in semi-darkness appears to catch the quality of a mysterious town with no inhabitants but plenty of cars to hotwire. Victor exceeds the remit of the family historian and doubles as a town archivist.
Auteurial surrogates
In Cruz Brothers, family history is a route to affi rming identity. José, the dreamy brother, says, “We got no records,” whereupon Felipe, cast as the more unaware brother, says they have plenty, by which he means that they have plenty of long playing records. Th at two of the brothers know the value of keeping track of family history, are self-conscious about being part of something larger, and that their stories have value shows that they are what Gramsci might call organic intellectuals, and more importantly, that they have the desire to express themselves artistically in what Minh-ha might dub art for everyday use (Gramsci 1971; Minh-ha 1991). An aura of transcendence marks the second sequence of the fi lm that introduces us to Victor’s archival project. eTh scene resists classical transparent realism and turns to an engaged modernism, perspectival but valid through its investment in the mythical character of Victor and the truth value of his narrative. Both Roth and Collins thought there was something mythical about the Cruz brothers and their exploits that seemed to put them in a diff erent world (Collins [1980] 2015).1 Th e fi lm seeks to understand their place and their displacement in the culture through a rendition of their exploits. Th e Roth stories att empt to mark the diff erences between the Cruz brothers and the others
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in the Puerto Rican community by using realistic language to describe the community while presenting the brothers as mythical. Where the Cruz brothers are mythical characters in the Roth stories, in the fi lm their presence renders the world magical, in part because the fi lm does not allow them to be compared with other Puerto Rican men. Th e only two “characters” the brothers encounter could both be considered ghosts: “Poppa,” and Miss Malloy, whose entrance and role in their lives is more than slightly incredible. Poppa fl atly states that only Victor, as the oldest, has the privilege of being able to see him. Victor is further “gift ed” or “burdened” by his self-appointed task as historian. As he dryly comments, his brothers are enjoying pinball machine games while he, “the lucky brother,” is talking to the machine. Our fi rst view of Victor on his own is shot to create an eff ect that is whimsical and slightly mythical in that he appears to be perched high up, giving him some sweep over the terrain. Th e camera tracks and pauses, and then cuts to the window; the exterior
Figure 3.1 Cruz Brothers: The ethnographer
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edging of the window in an exact reproduction of the frame of a painting. Victor is in his room with his head in the center of the window/painting frame, partly occupied with Poppa, and partly with the tape recorder, a Janus-like character, who cuts himself to size with his self-mockery. When the brothers meet Miss Malloy, a woman from a diff erent world, and a diff erent time, which is almost as important as being from a diff erent race, José is the brother who most picks up on her cadences of the past. Her ruminations are poetic, as she peels layers from herself to fi nd another selfthat she vaguely hopes exists, and so like José, despite many material artefacts, she appears to have no records of the self. She, more than the brothers, explicitly has a vision of restoring the house to its original splendor, an artist summoning up her past, refashioning herself. Th e project subtly impinges on shaping the Cruz brothers, a seemingly tangential but willed choice on her part. When she fi rst accosts the brothers, she is presented in an impressionistic mode, in the guise of one
Figure 3.2 Cruz Brothers: The fi gure of fate?
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of the Th ree Fates, perhaps even as Lachesis, the sister who measures the thread of life. Miss Malloy has the measure of the Cruz brothers when she says that “they tempt the Fates,” an adroit use of language that hints at her att raction for them, but unlike the mythological Fate Lachesis, she is measuring out her own life, and hence does not cast the shadow of an intractable fate on the Cruz brothers. Th eir coming into her life removes the fated quality of her own. Th e quality of Miss Malloy’s staged speech brings with it the illusory quality of a performance. Miss Malloy herself would seem to be directing a stage play, one in which she plays the leading role, the Cruz brothers being her “young princes.” Th ere is more than a glimmer of the stage director in her aspiration to create the perfect mise-en-scène for her exit lines by stage managing the restoration of the grounds and the house. In that sense, she serves as a surrogate auteurial fi gure, as does Victor the archivist. José, more than Victor, is spellbound by Miss Malloy and the sett ing of her house, telling her enthusiastically that it could be in a “movie.” And soon enough, he who had bemoaned the lack of “records” of their memories wants to buy a camera. In José, we witness the struggle of the performer who breaks away from the director, touchingly wanting to perform the prescribed role, and yet fearing that it is taking him away from his reality. In other words, he refuses to be manipulated by the “author,” reminding us of Luigi Pirandello’s characters who even as they search for an author restrict his authority. Th at he succeeds in buying the camera and in taking pictures countervails his role as performer in Miss Malloy’s improvisational theatre. Two sequences, one in the middle of the fi lm, when José is still wonderstruck by Miss Malloy’s house, and one later, in the ballroom, illustrate this confl ict. A low angle shot shows José nestled up on a tree branch in greenery that can only be described as sylvan. A long shot from José’s perspective captures Miss Malloy wearing a broad-brimmed, stylish hat walking towards the tree. He strikes a pose for his admiring fan, hamming the actor. She asks him for a line; he has no line, but when pressed
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comes up with “I’d like to take a picture of you, Miss Malloy.” She is enchanted, but he has switched roles neatly: he is no longer the actor in her artistic direction, she is the actor in his. In a sly nod to Lorenzo Tucker, the “Black Valentino,” Collins has Miss Malloy call José “Valentino.” Of course, José does not know who Valentino is, so although he wishes to act, he cannot be slott ed into established roles. Th e refusal is starker, if fi lled with anguish, later when he is dancing with her. A long shot presents them in almost ethereal lighting, but the secret spell is shatt ered for the audience who glimpse Felipe spying on them. We cut to a close-up of José’s face, crumpled, saying that this is “crazy,” confi rming José’s confl icted feelings as actor in Miss Malloy’s theatre. When Miss Malloy pleads with him, he desperately asks her to stop. José and Miss Malloy are unaware that the other two brothers are watching spellbound. Yet, our look is not relayed through their gaze; the brothers diff er in their reactions, disarraying ours. Th e scene closes to hushed silence. Th e eff ect is similar to the theatrical curtain call. Felipe, the recalcitrant brother, is a study of confusion in the fi lm. He is totally taken aback by Miss Malloy’s association with the Cruz brothers. Increasingly estranged by their willing assimilation into Miss Malloy’s world, Felipe appeals to ancestral authority. Always lurking, he sneaks into Victor’s room, listens to the tapes that say that Poppa has not been around for a while, and snarls at Victor that he does not like it when Poppa is not around. His fragile authority as the tough one cracks, even as he dimly understands that his brother is on a plane of understand- ing he cannot quite grasp. While he never completely acquires any authority, he is shown as struggling to understand the concept. He becomes increasingly disturbed by Victor and José’s unorthodox closeness to Miss Malloy. He stumbles upon them in an enchanting clearing ground and watches as each brother, with the steady courtesy of an Elizabethan gentleman, dances in step with Miss Malloy. Th e composition of the scene envelops off -screen space. A long shot introduces Miss Malloy as she dances in the center of the green carefully edged by bushes producing
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the eff ect of an interior and an exterior. Victor makes an entrance from stage right, bows, as the camera with a slight waver catches them in the dance. A tracking shot takes us to José entering from stage rear, watching them, and then stepping into the ground, as he takes Victor’s place and dances with greater ardor than Victor, with eyes closed; José enjoys the courtly ritual, and the erotic pleasure of the dance. A cut brings us to the sound of clatt ering as Felipe blusters through the bushes mutt ering “loca.” He reacts with fear, mutt ering “Poppa, oh Poppa” several times, looking to a higher authority to sort out this outrage. His sense of stability is completely shaken up. Th e soundtrack follows Felipe’s fears for the stability of his identity. Th rough the whole sequence, the soundtrack plays plaintive music with no readily visible diegetic source. Th e eff ect is shatt ering when Felipe shouts for the music to stop, a moment of cutt ing through the magic that he too had experienced but wanted to end. When the music stops, the clash between the improbable and the mundane is jarring. When the dancers pause, shocked, all are aware of the boundaries that had been breached. Although Felipe appears to be outside the magical circle, the scene emphasizes his vulnerability and his visceral struggle with the notion that a Puerto Rican can be something other than what the stereotype dictates.
Philosophy and art in fi lm
Losing Ground is overt about its auteurial surrogate in the diegesis and forceful about establishing black female authority. We start with a medium close-up of Sara mid-stream in a lecture on Sartre and existentialism. A high angle long shot tracks from the top row to the bott om row of students seated in a lecture hall until we get to Sara at the lectern. We see a full shot of her before we see another shot of her from another side of the room. Th e vastness of the space gives her absolute power of the word; and although not a voice over, the lecture carries the overtones of ex nihilo discourse.
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It is clear, too, that the professor is thinking through the problem of existence, what life means, as she explains the precepts of existen- tialism. Sara speaks with passion about war, existence, the absurd movement, and Sartre’s texts making the abstract questions of essence and existence immediate and urgent ones. Th e terms of the lecture secure the fi lm’s place in the genre of philosophical fi lms. From the routine questions at the opening, a conversation between instructor and student shift s to a conversation on Genet and issues of social identity including race and sexuality. If Th e Cruz Brothers validates the organic intellectual, the artist, and the journeyman’s fears of the intellectual, Losing Ground opens with what Gramsci might term the traditional intellectual. Whereas in Gramscian terms a traditional intellectual consolidates the authority of the ruling class, and in the Althusserian formulation shores up their coerciveness by ideological state apparatuses, invoking consent for their hegemony (Gramsci 1971; Althusser 1971), Sara enthusiastically tells her students about Sartre’s book on Genet emphasizing the subversive challenge of the outsider to the status quo:
It’s the fi nest analysis of being an outsider I’ve ever read . . . it’s a wonderful book, he touches every feeling, every mental attitude connected with exclusion. The young man stares at her with deep respect. (Klotman 1991: 127)
Th e script and scene alike characterize Sara as an instructor who commands the unqualifi ed respect of her students based on her knowledge and her intellectual energy. Within the diegesis, Sara, while maintaining the authority of the intellectual, brings a passion into the discourse that militates against the detachment, the lie of objectivity, that traditional philosophy might be expected to purvey.2 Sara is not only an able communicator of philosophical ideas, she does research in areas that delve into the interior and seeks to name them. In this endeavor, like feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, she seeks a language to articulate experiences that are transcendent but not
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necessarily connected to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Again, Collins forcefully signals that the fi lm is about philosophy and human beings seeking to fi nd new philosophical frameworks to understand themselves. Married to an artist who makes plans for the summer that revolve around his painting projects, Sara Rogers insists on having some control over her time to pursue her research on ecstatic experience. In a sequence that gives pride of place to philosophical language, we see Sara reading in a library. Th e image of her reading, far removed from other images of black women in fi lm, establishes reading as an activity in and of itself. eTh trope, a carryover from African American literature, is dense in claiming the literacy of black women as an absolute. As she reads, we hear her voice over puzzling out the intricacies of experiences that are “original,” unmediated by the divine. Th e text she reads outlines the idea that as human beings our belonging in society does not vitiate against our “consciousness” being “original.” Th at this deeply felt thought is invaluable for the self is a proposition that Sara will test later when she explores the connections between being for others and being for the self when she performs in her student’s fi lm. In the library, Sara is accosted by a man who regards her with astonishment as she seems to be eating the words and swallowing the ideas. Th eir discussion ranges from western theological concepts on ecstasy to the Gnostics, who were more “intuitive.” Sara is contemplating the fl ows of disorderly Dionysiac energy. Her conversation with the unnamed stranger, who himself seems to have been summoned for the specifi c purpose of the discussion, also takes in the possibility of otherworldly realities through psychic readings. Th us, her notions of philosophy are not exclusively derived from the western Enlightenment tradition. Here, we see Sara claiming an authority as a pioneering researcher, one who can contribute to the thought of the world. Th e combination of the mise-en-scène, with its aura of the sacred, and her own voice over, again ex nihilo, forges a harmonious balance between place and sound, indicating not just Sara’s ease with both but her mastery.
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Th e auteurial signature could not be more deliberate. Collins herself was a professor, had translated a monograph on precisely the topic that Sara was discussing, and had writt en fi ction and plays featuring the theme (Mars [1946] 1977). To add to the richness of the character’s intellectual orientation, Collins also features her as the lead character in a student fi lm. atTh metafi lmic device is yet another way that the auteurial signature is inscribed in the fi lm, commenting on what fi lm itself can eroff philosophy, the dramatization of abstract and pragmatic thought. Th e Eisensteinian model—dialectical montage—demands intellectual reasoning, advancing though on the processes of history. In his discussion of Eisenstein’s use of dialectical montage and the close-up, Deleuze suggests that the notion of the time-image indicates that fi lm can advance the kinds of questions that animate the study of philosophy, and can perhaps even introduce new ones (Rushton 2012: 101). Collins’s departure into existential questions of experience would constitute such a query. She had made an extensive study of these fi lms in France, and we can discern that direction in her fi lms even when the themes are diff erent. Th e literary references to Albert Camus and the absurd that Godard makes in Breathless (1960) through the character of Michel Poiccard are here evoked in a philosophical context. Th e fi lm features discussions onthese themes among Sara, her artist husband, Victor, and Duke, the otherworldly acquaintance Sara meets at the library. As Collins has acknowledged, she particularly admired Rohmer’s My Night with Maud for being able to choreograph the language of fi lm with that of ideas; a fi lm where all people do is talk, and we watch, riveted. Rohmer’s fi lm features long conversations on Pascal (Nicholson 1988/9: 10). To a large extent, Collins found a way of detaching the narrative scaff olding that Rohmer uses to arrive at a sharp skeletal discussion by putt ing the intellectual question at the center of life’s doings, in the sequences of Sara lecturing and of her reading. Th us, Collins’s fi lm places the philosophical question as the quest motif, compelling the narrative to follow the arc of the philosophical. Th e pragmatist school of thought rejects the idea that fi lm can be properly philosophical, unless it is about the philosophy
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of fi lm, and here, as Collins’s fi lm uses the fi lm within the fi lm to theorize on the philosophical question of ecstasy, Losing Ground could be considered exemplary (Smith and Wartenberg 2006). Th e argument put forth by critics who believe it is an over-reach for fi lms to strive to be philosophy is that fi lm’s use value lies in simplifying philosophical concepts and making them more accessible to a wider audience. Certainly, the fi lm could be used as a companion piece to discuss existentialism, its social applications in contexts that Sartre had not anticipated, its relevance to race and to gender. Th e motif of the artist further allows us to think through ideas of the self and existence as conventionally represented by philosophers and artists. In many senses, the narrative’s overarching confl ict is abstract in that it stages a confrontation between a philosophical and an artistic perspective on self and existence. Staged as a debate that has reaches beyond the intellectual, Sara and Victor, her artist husband, talk about the emotions and ideas provoked by practicing philosophy and art. It is tempting to understand this debate in this ultimately philosophical fi lm as being about the diff erences between the male and female auteurial signatures. Th e same director who had with infi nite delicacy constituted Victor and José in Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy as auteur surrogates is reticent about the male artist’s authority when it is placed alongside the female. Certainly, both the male artist and the female philosopher wish for some relationship with the creative that far exceeds the claims of possession or legal authority, the intellectual roots of the concept of authorship and auteurship (Silverman 1992). And they do have a common understanding that “black” as a signifi er is slid to qualify, classify, and perhaps exclude black art and philosophy. Th at particular bind for scholars and critics continues as they struggle between the dialectic of universality and specifi city. eTh philosopher George Yancy reports that when he told his “white philosopher mentor” that he was thinking of specializing in African American philosophy, the mentor’s response was: “Make sure you don’t get pegged” (2004: 1). Both Sara and Victor do not lend too much credence to the pegging. While Victor mocks it, and himself, when he says he is a “genuine Negro success,” Sara when discussing
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Sartre, Genet, and “exclusion” in metaphysical and philosophical terms suggests that the specifi cis universal, and that the universal in turn is specifi c. Of Genet, she says, “He touches every feeling, every att itude connected with exclusion.” Th e specifi c experience of estrangement, whether of homosexuality, ethnicity, race, or gender, fl ows from the particular to the universal, while the awareness of absurdity as the only rational response to an arbitrary world fl ows from the universal to the particular.
Sexuality and the male artist
Philosophical diff erences between Victor and Sara run through the fi lm, as Victor deliberately undermines Sara’s authority by mocking her philosophical project for the summer; her need for books and intellectual stimulation as being less authentic than his own artistic “trance”-like impulses. Collins uses this current of tension between Victor and Sara to explore the diff erences between male and female auteurship. She deconstructs Victor’s authority by showing the texts of the future subjects of his paintings. Although Victor claims that he is shift ing to represen- tational art as distinct from abstract art, the point of view shots that capture Victor’s subjects show that he is all too invested in inserting himself as auteur in his depiction. As he walks through the town, his sketch pad open, he appears to invite the att ention of each of the subjects, all of them being Puerto Rican women. Victor’s att empt at his fi rst sketch delicately reveals his desires as an artist and as a man. A low angle slightly slanted shot places Victor almost at the edge of the frame as he glances up at the balcony; a cut takes us to the woman leaning on the balcony sill. Victor then looks up at the woman, smiling gallantly but with gestures that beckon. Th e woman returns the look, and then turns away almost deliberately posing. Th is scenario is repeated three times, making the artistic endeavor an erotic transaction between the male artist and the (unwitt ing) female model.
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Figure 3.3 Losing Ground: “Form, color, light”
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Collins contrasts the male artist’s relationship to art and sex with the female intellectual’s. Th eir ideas are of course based not on gender but on their intellectual and artistic formations. While gender may not be primary, it inserts itself insidiously into the discourse; thus, the language used is revealing. Aft er a shoot in New York City, Sara returns to their upstate New York house with her fellow actor, Duke, the gentleman she had met in the library. Even before Sara and Duke arrive, Collins elaborates on the link between sex and painting. When Victor is lobbing back and forth regarding the merits of abstract vs. repre- sentational art with his abstract painter friend Carlos, he contrasts Carlos’s purity with his own deceit. We had fi rst seen him in the neighborhood, sketching women, jaunty and fl irtatious. His ac- quaintanceship with Celia, a young Puerto Rican woman, starts on a diff erent note. A medium long shot shows us Victor in the background looking at Celia dance in the park. He is carried away by the ebullience of the moment and moves to join her, but not before pointedly throwing his sketch pad in the air. She becomes his model. Cross cutt ing systematically follows the pursuits of Sara in New York and Victor in upstate. Th e parallel editing is so symmetrically matched that Collins features Sara dancing in the shooting of the fi lm with Duke, her acquaintance from the library, and Victor slow dancing in an intimate space with Celia. Th e scenes of Sara and Victor are carefully patt erned to enable the viewer to make her/his own judgments. Sara is presented as very calm and rational in her discussion with her mother on Victor’s sexual/artistic adventuring. In a discussion with her mother about her husband’s sexual behaviors, the protagonist says without rancor that there have always been women. When her mother asks her quite explicitly how she feels about it, she says that Victor is always having sex with “color, form, light.” And it appears that she is admiring his capacity to do the latt er. What is striking is not the distinction between the women and sex, and painting and sex, but the similarity between the two. At this juncture, Sara has just started acting in a student’s fi lm project and is beginning to feel ambivalent about Victor’s
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enthusiasm for his latest painting subject, Celia, the young Puerto Rican woman. We see a petulant Victor in the company of Celia and Carlos, his friend who is an abstract painter. When Sara and Duke join them, he demands att ention from Celia and brusquely dismisses Sara with, “I keep forgett ing you don’t know how to dance.” Th e irony is not lost on the viewer; despite Sara’s demurrals, we have seen, not one, but two dance sequences that the diegetic audience applauded. Th e evening and morning aft er take a nasty turn when Victor, playful but ugly, insists on gett ing into Celia’s sleeping bag and pushes himself on top of her. Sara comes into the scene and is appalled at what she sees. Curiously, the issue of Victor’s piling on to Celia is disregarded, as this scene becomes a part of not only Sara’s marital relationship with Victor but their distinct approaches to art and the intellect. Her spontaneous fury with Victor’s behavior is all the more explosive because of her even, temperate speech throughout. Given the horror and shame of the moment, Sara’s
Figure 3.4 Losing Ground: “Don’t you take your dick out like it was artistic like it’s some goddamn paintbrush”
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response about Victor’s artistic/sexual being is both philosophical and analytic: “Don’t you take your dick out like it was artistic like it’s some goddamn paintbrush?” Victor’s angry response is almost unbelievable, seemingly claiming the droit de l’artiste. Th e opening sequences of the fi lm subtly draw out the diff erences between a possible male and female auteur surrogate fi gure in the diegesis. While Sara is in the pit of the lecture hall and her students are higher up visually, the power of her att empting to think things through with them to some extent and to communicate with them makes it a very dialogic interaction, even if she is the cardinal authority fi gure in the room. Before we fi rst see Victor, we hear him off screen talking to Sara, and when we do fi rst see him, we see him from Sara’s point of view. Victor is up on a ladder, leaning down towards her, while she looks up at him; she resists climbing it, but eventually succumbs. In and of itself, the sequence does not suggest any kind of domination, but followed up as it is intermitt ently in the narrative by at least four sequences, two with Sara and two with Celia, where he is standing and painting the female model, who in each case seems to be openly resentful about the stillness forced on her, the scenes together suggest a model of male authoritarianism and artistry over female inertness and matt er. Th e deconstruction of the male artist, a substitute for the male auteur, is very specifi c and directed at auteurial investment in the signature as opposed to the work of art. Victor begins with a yearning for “purity” in art, abstract art that would express what his mentor calls “form.” He has a light-hearted conversation with Sara about the diff erences in his att itudes to abstract and represen- tational art. Intriguingly, we enter their conversation mid-stream. A medium long shot frames Sara posing in a stylized way, seated by the window. Th ey are chatt ing as Victor paints her:
Victor. . . . too representational . . . Sara. What do you mean . . . Victor. I’ve shied away from it as too easy . . . Sara. You mean to paint people and things is a cop-out.
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Although mocking, Sara gets to the truth when she implies that Victor would have to pay attention to the subject in represen- tational matter, unlike abstract art where he would be focusing on shape and color. Representing people, Sara insinuates, takes looking into their truth, not putting the artistic imprimatur on canvas. Sara herself appears to define her intellectual interests in both abstract and concrete dimensions. The connection she makes between Genet’s existentialism, his outsider status, and its social relevance resonates with Angela Davis’s notion that philosophy is not merely a “specific mode of thought” as much as it is a “quotidian way of living in the world” (Yancy 1998: 7). The protagonist in Losing Ground might well agree but add that reconciling the external and the internal would constitute a philosophical way of life, a common thread in black philosophy, African diaspora thought, and Eastern philosophy, but not quite so central in the euro-american philosophical tradition.
Figure 3.5 Losing Ground: Male artist/auteur
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The authority of the actor
If Victor’s authority is deconstructed, in an unexpected twist, Sara’s is too. Th e collected persona of the opening sequence is slowly altered by the pulls of the people surrounding her. While Victor’s high-handed suggestion that Sara move upstate for the summer, follow him and sideline her own research project, is overtly patronizing, Sara’s mother’s suggestion is no less an aff ront but perhaps less noticeable. When Sara, impassioned, describes the state she experiences when she knows she has understood something deeply about the world, in other words, created a relevant philosophy, her mother suggests that she write a play about her mother’s life. Th e moment is soft ened by the humor; the irony, however, is that Sara herself fi nds a diff erent kind of philosophy through her mother’s chosen passion, acting. Th e motif of acting is doubled in the fi lm with the mother playing a theatre actor, and the daughter acting in a fi lm. The female “actor” in the fi lm within the fi lm carries the “trace” or the Derridean sense of radical otherness from the unitary subject (Derrida 1976).3 Th e actor is very oft en the most dominated person on the set, but can frequently, especially in the feminist and African American fi lm context, transmit a social authority far exceeding her diegetic role. In many instances, this authority directly refers to the accrual of greater agency in the social. Lena Horne in 1930s and 40s Hollywood fi lms played herself in set musical cabaret pieces. Her presence in the fi lm invited a more socially infl ected reading. Her persona registered the entrance of black women even as the diegesis of the fi lm sought to constrain her to her acting role (Ramanathan 2015). Rather, her popularity commanded a public space for black women. Mrs. Rogers the theatre actor, and Sara Rogers the star of a fi lm directed by a student would seem to express this double articulation of the black female actor, disempowered and empowered. Mrs. Rogers complains about the typecast mammy roles she is obliged to keep playing. She quips that she is expected to be thinking of God, but spends more time thinking about men! Th e
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stereotypical role that Sara seems to be playing in the student fi lm, replete with performance elements, is close enough to the role of the Jezebel. In foregrounding these obvious stereotypes, Collins uses a strategy that would later become very useful in feminist fi lms such as Chadha’sBhaji on the Beach (1993) where the extra-diegetic interprets the diegesis, mocking its own overblown stereotyping. Th e contrast between the black archetypes and the persons themselves could not be greater. Th e disjuncture in the structure between the diegetic and the extra-diegetic renders the auteurial signature shaky. Collins, unlike Chadha later, does not mark the diff erence decisively but would seem to suggest that even as the archetype is inauthentic, its appearance is belied by the possibility of an emotional truth or authenticity that is paradoxically obscured by the falseness of the appearance. Caryl Phillips’s novel on Bert Williams, a stage actor in the 1920s who eventually became one of the most famous actors of his time, delves into the psychic tremors caused by a black man donning blackface and playing a coon. Dancing in the Dark (2005) reveals that Bert Williams chooses to use the authority of the entertainer to remind himself and his audience of who he is in the US. Tragedy perhaps, but not pathos. Th e discrepancies in Losing Ground between the archetypal performer, the extra-diegetic dancer and the philosopher professor are pronounced, but the female actor appears to accrue authority in the extra-diegetic sequence which spills over into the diegesis. Th e fi rst sequence of the Frankie and Johnny fi lm merely set up the roles of the vaudeville performers featured in the African American folktale to add a theatrical dimension to the fi lm within the fi lm. eTh vaudeville performer or the theatrical actor can appeal directly to the audience, perhaps even adjusting movements, facial gestures, and line delivery based on the audience response. Th e Frankie and Johnny sequences combine some elements of stage and fi lm acting to enhance the authority of Frankie, the stage actor, and Sara, the fi lm actor playing the role of stage actor. Performances featuring female fi gures in fi lm inevitably address the male viewer, suturing his look to that of the male viewer in
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the diegesis, rendering the female and her emotions secondary to male viewing pleasure. Th e Frankie and Johnny sequences overturn the male viewer’s expectations, augmenting the authority of the female actor. Th e second shoot, however, includes Victor in the audience. He is on the edge of the frame, watching in sheer amazement as close-ups on Sara highlight the intense emotions of the stage actor’s despair at Johnny’s betrayal. When she blows Johnny away with her gun, Victor, placed in the diegesis outside the fi lm within the fi lm, feels physically assaulted. Sara does not return his look. Th e acting in the fi lm takes recourse to the centrality of the action and does not engage in manipulation through techniques of cutt ing or tracking, with the camera holding still to capture the stage performance. Th e viewer Victor, however, occupies the place of the cinematic viewer. Where cabaret sequences favor frontal shots of female dancers who are on their own, as in Von Sternberg’s Th e Blue Angel (1930), and the female performer and male viewer are both part of the diegesis, subtly intimating the power of the male viewer outside the diegesis, here the male viewer is completely on the other side of the screen in the anonymous darkness, lost in the shadows with no role to play but to watch. A very diff erent role for Victor, who cannot abide not being the center of att ention. Sara’s acting is clearly intended to show the sweep of her imaginative identifi cation with Frankie, but also to expose the tiny gap between the actor and the character she plays, acting Frankie but also her own existence. Diff erently from the Method style of acting, or the Stanislavskian where the actor is subsumed, here she affi rms her presence. And she maintains her authority while devastated. Is she aware that Victor is watching her? Th is question is pertinent because her sense of herself apart from him, as a creative individual, is crucial to the accrual of feminist authority in the text. Early in the fi lm and through her lectures, both male and female students comment on her passion and her enthusiasm, always politely saying that her husband must appreciate her for what they perceive to be rare qualities. Each time, Sara is perplexed and slightly annoyed. Are these qualities
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striking because they add to her value in a man’s eyes, or are they intrinsically important for her own existence? One critic insists that the comments of the students are an acknowledgment of the teacher’s erotic energy; regardless, the female intellectual is placed in the male libidinal frame of reference. Th at he does not know her, as his startled facial expressions show, points to her graceful departure from established patt erns. More emphatically, even though he is looking at her, he does not know her; thus, Collins denies the male the power of vision and, with it, Victor’s very identity as a painter, based as it is on vision. Th e doubling apparent in the role of the actor/professor, while incongruous, off ers a particularly feminist motif in the notion of the inhabitation of otherness that is originally introduced as a topic in the philosophy lecture hall pertaining to existentialism and Genet. Th e self is represented not in terms of its absolute ego, not as unitary, but doubled. It has become commonplace in feminist criticism to suggest that certain texts approximate l’écriture feminine. While I am not applying that model to this text, I do fi nd the Irirgarayan concept outlined in “When our lips speak together” (without forcing the body homology) quite apt in the doubling of the actor/philosopher: “Not one without the other” referring to completion as a function of doubleness. Th e “one-sidedness” that Victor had mocked in Sara, the discursive control that Sara wields as an intellectual, is complemented by her acting as an/other seemingly wholly diff erent from her (Irigaray 1985b). Th e possibility of the protagonist acting is mentioned early in the fi lm when a student asks, without any hope of being entertained, whether there is any chance of Sara acting in his senior project. She laughs the question away, but later, when Victor dismisses her philosophy research project for the summer, and appears to be in an “ecstatic private trance,” she says, almost rebelliously, “I could be another Dorothy Dandridge . . .” and then off screen says, “. . . come to grips with a certain fullness.” Th e language Sara uses to describe Victor, and her comparison of him to a musician who plays his instrument through the day, is
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almost a projection of what Sara herself is trying to study, ecstasy. Webster’s most restrictive defi nition fi ts the case here: “Implies a trance like state where the mind is fi xed on what it contemplates or conceives.” Th e word “trance” is folded into Sara’s earlier charge that Victor’s “private” ecstasy connotes absence, or “being beside oneself.” It is not incidental that in this critique of Victor on a topic she has been researching, she appears, unwitt ingly, to have found how unsatisfactory some western philosophical disquisi- tions are. Spontaneously, she off ers another model of not “being away” but “being there,” using Dorothy Dandridge, the black fi lm actor, almost as a conduit. It is not accidental that Dandridge is introduced as a response to Victor’s artistic (self-)absorption. Collins interjects the notion of authentic artistry by using the fi gure of the actor. In sett ing Dandridge up as an ego ideal, Collins obliquely gestures to her place in African American fi lm. Dandridge plays the role of a free- spirited young woman in Carmen Jones but is doomed to the fate of the tragic mulatt a. Th e theme of the tragic female mulatt a is mentioned in Losing Ground at least twice, once with reference to Th e Scar of Shame suggesting that art including the social, or “messy” lives of people, is both valid and extremely vital. Hence Sara’s scornful dismissal of Victor when he moots the idea that her desire is spurred by her mother’s professional career as an actor. An early silent fi lm,Th e Scar of Shame (dir. Perugini and produced by Philadelphia Colored Players, 1927) serves as sub-text to the acting motif and throws light on the artistry of the actor. Lucia Lynn Moses plays the role of Louise, a young mulatt o female in the city, abused and exploited by her step-father, his friend, and later relegated to a side by her, again not coincidentally, her artist husband, the pianist, seeking to be the black Beethoven. In a more sidereal manner, it adds heft to the idea of the female actor as central to the fi lm, taking us away from the offi cial auteurial signature. Th at women actors are central to fi lm would seem to be self-evident; however, their importance has largely been understood in terms of the visual pleasure, voyeuristic, scopophilic, fetishistic that they off er. A diff erent strain of
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feminist scholarship would indicate, particularly in the case of silent cinema, that far from being the objects of manipulation as in the exemplary case of the master auteur, Hitchcock, they are responsible for shaping the character, particularly in instances where scripts were rough, sketchy, and hazy at best. Th is is true of Lucia Lynn Moses, who carries the fi lm from its beginning when she plays the young girl overwhelmed by the males in her life, themselves beset by the vices of the city. It also speaks to the contributions that Seret Scott , who plays Sara Rogers, brings to the fi lm. Collins and she were close friends, and Scott had acted in many of Collins’s plays. In keeping with Collins’s approach to fi lmmaking, Scott did much to act the role of Sara Rogers subtly (Stallings 2011: 52). To return to the sub-text of the tragic mulatt a as it pertains to Losing Ground: both the student director, and Duke, Sara’s opposite lead in the student fi lm, mention the theme with reference to the African American Frankie and Johnny tale/ballad. Th e tragic mulatt o theme adds to the density of the literariness of the fi lm, without crediting a specifi c authority, the tale being common property and having a long history in African American women’s literature beginning with one of the fi rst novels, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy. Th ese intersect with the story of Louise in Th e Scar of Shame and the new black migration to the north. Finding that her upper-caste husband refuses to take her home to his mother and their “set,” Louise avenges herself on him by wrongly claiming that he had shot her. She then refashions herself as a city highfl yer, but eventually, remorseful, commits suicide. Frankie’s blowing Johnny away at the end of the fi lm within the fi lm, with its implications for Sara and Victor, is a reprisal of that theme, insisting on its continued relevance to the African American community, particularly the new post-caste lines that had emerged. When Sara decides to play that role, she also chooses the many others that are imbricated in it, claiming her authority as both philosopher and female actor/ artist. Th at the genealogy of the fi lm stretches to the folkloric, the literary, and the fi lmic also succeeds in diminishing the controlling command of the conventional director/auteur.
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In focusing on the authority of the actor, Collins deliberately moves away from that of the director on set, and instead captures the collaboration of the director, artists, and actors on set to dispense with the singular auteurial signature.
Notes
1 Very, very loosely based on some students who participated in Roth’s wife’s art therapy courses, the fi lm enlarges their daredevil antics that are plausible and say something larger in and about the culture. 2 As of 2016, the percentage of black women instructors across the ranks is 3 percent (IES: National Center for Educational Statistics, available at
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They would never fall from that narrow railing’s grace. (Roth 1989: 89)
When asked about what she hoped to achieve with her fi lms, Collins chose to speak of the process of fi lmmaking itself. She said she wrote of characters who would appear grander on screen than they were in real life. She did not want realistic men or women but people with a touch of the mythical about them (Franklin 1981: 31).1 At fi rst glance, the story of three Puerto Rican boys and a New York woman may not strike us as mythical material. Th e fi lm’s use of “metalanguage” of the magical and the marvelous in a modern context is recognizable to audiences as myth (Sanders 2006: 63). It is useful, for heuristic purposes, to distinguish between the magical and the marvelous in the mythical. Th e magical is characterized by surface properties that have shock value, the marvelous by a mixing of the real and the extraordinary that is accepted as reality. Finding the mythical ur narrative of Colombia, Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, fascinating, Henry Roth transplanted some of the material to North American shores in his Th e Cruz Chronicle. Collins uses a small sliver of this collection of stories of the three brothers to “translate” it into fi lm, to fi nd narrative solutions for the problems of these quasi-mythical characters (Collins [1980] 2015; Klotman [1982] 2015).
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Collins identifi ed two problems in the making of the fi lm: fi rstly, whether to corporealize the ghost father, and secondly, whether Miss Malloy, who is a fairly insubstantial fi gure in the short story, should take up more narrative space. She decided to use sound to summon the ghost father, and the camera to indicate the origin of the voice very sparingly. Th ese decisions were crucial in the creation of the magical/marvelous aura of Cruz Brothers. Th e fi lm’s turn to an alternative mode of realism was prompted by Collins’s ideas on the ethical. Her defi nition of the moral is unorthodox: a “certain friendship” off ered by life that enables one, despite social pressures, to develop oneself. Th e decision to tap into that possibility is, for Collins, a political one. And this means allowing oneself to enjoy experiences, such as the Cruz brothers do with Miss Malloy without being threatened by them. She sought to characterize the Cruz brothers as light-hearted about their own diffi culties, and not obsessed with solving them but opening themselves to life (Franklin 1981; Collins [1980] 2015). Cruz Brothers, although generically similar to Rohmer’s essai fi lm My Night with Maud (1969), is quite diff erent in terms of both the fi lmmaking process and the philosophy underlying both fi lms. Rohmer’s fi lm follows his short story of the same title. Collins picked one piece in the Chronicle called “Th e Brothers and Miss Malloy,” which is only ten pages long. As mentioned earlier, Collins worked closely with the actors to help fl esh out the fi lm; thus, it was more of a “translation” than an adaptation. Rohmer and Collins diff er in their conception of grace as they do in the development of the moral in the narrative. My Night with Maud suggests that the hero can acquire a predestined grace if he overcomes moral inertia. For Collins, grace is universal and requires only that the individual accept diff erence in the humanity of others. Coincidence is integral to the investiture of grace in Rohmer’s fi lm, a plot device to drive home the notion of predestination. Although Cruz Brothers does have some instances of chance, coincidence does not play a role. Th e absence of coincidence is
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vital to the depiction of grace in the fi lm: fi rstly, because it does not signify the predestination of grace that My Night with Maud does, and secondly, because it veers away from African American melodrama’s plot machinations, choosing rather to use a magical/ marvelous mode of narration where grace is a given. It is instructive to explore the use of coincidence in My Night With Maud and its use as a staple in African American fi lm, with a view to understanding how Collins’s mode of narration constructs the universalist world view of the fi lm. Coincidences off er closure in Rohmer’s essai film, justice in African American fi lm melodramas. Th e plot of My Night With Maud is organized around an unnamed male character who comes across as quite morally complacent, revealed in a lengthy conversation that takes up 43 minutes of screen time. His interlocutor is a woman of liberal views, Maud. He sees a girl in church and, seemingly following his fate, marries her. Coincidences litt er the fi lm. First, the protagonist meets an old friend while browsing through Pascal; the friend takes him to visit Maud where they discuss Pascal and predestina- tion. Coincidence crops up again when he runs into the girl whom he has seen at church and has decided at fi rst glance to marry. Towards the close of the fi lm, he and his wife separately run into Maud, and here, by another coincidence the protagonist fi nds out that the adulterous love aff air Maud’s husband was having was with his wife. Th e Rohmer fi lm needs the last coincidence to establish that the nameless male character chooses to forgive his wife wordlessly and hence acquires grace. Noting that coincidences in melodrama are particularly apposite to socially subordinated groups, Jane Gaines argues that the complex use of coincidence in melodrama in the African American literary and fi lmic traditions is essential to obliterate the “narrative ‘piling on’ of the overwhelming odds against freedom and safety” (1993: 57). Using Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919), she argues that the fi lm exploits coincidence to make what is impossible for black people possible. Coincidence then provides an escape hatch from the myriad diffi culties laid out in
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the plot. Consequently, coincidence in melodrama is powerfully appealing and useful to oppressed groups for arriving at some semblance of justice (Gaines 1993: 57). Unlike both Rohmer and African American fi lmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Collins turns to a magical/marvelous mode that, in eff ect, enables her not to rely so heavily on plot to deliver grace and, as it were, a form of justice for the Cruz Brothers. To reprise, the “metalanguage” she uses is a powerful vehicle for conveying the truth at a mythical level removed from plot considerations. Collins’s evocation of the possibilities of the magical in the modern involve the use of color, sound, and cinematography. While there are instances in the fi lm where we are transported to a diff erent space bound by illusionistic rules, the boundaries between the magical and the modern are liminal. Th e fi lm opens with such an instance when the ghost of Victor’s father, Poppa, appears to him. Th e fi gure of Poppa folds the magical and the marvelous real, both its extraordinariness, and the acceptance of it as ordinary and at times downright annoying. Th e appearance of Poppa marks the turbulence of modernity in this sequence on the “relation between the ordinary and dramatic” (Majumdar 2015: 155). Th e banal is extraordinary in the fi lm, partly because the prospect of an older european american woman sharing meals and conversation with three Puerto Ricans is almost taboo. Th e fi lm shows characters with the ability to grasp the world outside of their own community; Collins considered Roth’s stories to belong to world literature, and she att ributed her interest in them to this universalist strain. Like much world literature, the stories seem to belong to their place but also to other places (Franklin 1981: 31; Ronald Gray in Collins [1982] 2015). Th e etiology of magical realism in fi lm when compared with literature is radically diff erent in that in fi lm the hallucinatory quality of the imagery acts to terrorize any representational link, decoupling the eye from the gaze. Using Lacan, Jameson (1986) explains that the technical properties of the image and of the use of color, the pressure to discern diff erent reds or blues on screen,
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its assault on the perception, obscures the axis of action in the fi lm. He argues that color particularly functions in some pre- linguistic realm that impinges on the libidinal apparatus, comparable to dreams where the referents are hard to fi nd. In general, he theorizes that magical realism in fi lm loses the linguistic and narrative anchor that high modernist literature maintains. His observations are a useful departure point for considering magical realism in Collins’s fi lm. Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy takes recourse to a literary magical realism, or what Alejo Carpentier in the 1920s called “marvelous realism” (Carpentier 2006). He famously insisted that unlike european surrealist artists who att empted to capture dreams and visions, the Latin American artist only had to look around to apprehend the wonders of the new world. Th e new world was marvelous because of the coexistence of two temporalities in the same space, as exemplifi ed in the opening ofOne Hundred Years of Solitude in the time of the fi rst human beings in a world freshly created, marveling at the modernity of ice. Th e entrance of modernity also turns out to be marvelous in its initial impact, if not in the longue durée. Th e Cruz Brothers reveals the incongruity of two worlds in the “encounter” between the brothers and Miss Malloy. Th e fi lm plays between magical and marvelous realism, drawing out the disparities, but uses the literary narrative to reveal a modern less unitary and more plural. Th e use of objects is generally associated with “magical realism,” but Collins imposes a narrative overlay, gesturing to the marvelous real. Th e dominance of objects in visual culture was fi rst recognized by Franz Roh, who called the work of German painters George Grosz and Ott o Dix “magic realism” in 1925 to describe the exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit or New Realism (Roh 1925). Th e objects then captivate, specifi cally in that opening sequence of Cruz Brothers, which is explosive. A close-up of the bonnet of a blue shiny car fi lls the frame, the human beings in the car scarcely visible. No sooner does one of the men get out of the car when a voice over with a dire warning plunges us into the mysterious. Victor responds to the voice’s remonstrances as he alights from
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the car and walks straight into the camera, speaking to a Poppa who is absent in the diegesis. Victor walks towards a car parked in front of him, explaining that he is not stealing the car, merely stripping it, giving us some narrative hint. However, there is a gap in our understanding of where the voice is located and how Victor is listening to it when we cannot locate its source. Poppa’s story of the Cortezes and the Cruzes produces a long caesura in the action while Victor starts the car, crashes it, and then runs away with his brothers, with Poppa providing the narrative fl ourish, “Th ey run away like scared rabbits.” Th e adventure of the brothers is in one time, the voice of Poppa is in the pastness of the past, obtruding in the present, changing the complexion of the “now.” Th e suggestion that the magical realist surfaces of the objects dispenses with narrative does not hold for this segment of the fi lm. Rather, Collins off ers us narrative surplus that transforms the magical real into the kind of mythical realism that Carpentier had envisioned when he detailed the “realism” of Latin America. Th e scene that follows aft er the boys run away from the car plumps on the side of narrative, banishing the glitt ering power of objects and images. In its place, sound dominates, substituting for the object a loud gun-shot, immediately followed by the voice over of Poppa. Poppa has the honor of fi lling the narrative lacuna left from the fi rst sequence, explaining in matt er-of-fact terms that he had been shot and killed in a bank heist gone awry but had triumphed by digging himself out to watch over the boys, as, we might add, ancestors are supposed to. Outside of the narration of the apparatus, we also have a narrator in Poppa, who is named. Th e density of the narration is unorthodoxly accentuated by the total blackness of the screen as Poppa holds forth. It appears to be a deliberate move not to allow the image pride of place, but to stress the narrative continuity in the diegesis, even if initiated by an extra-diegetic, fl eshless voice. Notwithstanding his diegetic absence, Poppa’s narrative serves to function as exposition to the diegesis, kindly lett ing the audience know that only his son can hear him. Th e voice as trace is remarkably light-hearted, and is oddly inserted into the diegetic time, unlike other magical realist
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narratives where the story has already been writt en, as with the Melquíades book in Sanskrit that foretells the story of Macondo’s Buendías. Th e voice also traverses space and gives us a bridge to the next sequence where Victor has another shiny object, a tape recorder, in his hand. Th e machine’s magical properties exceed their technical function in that it is used for the grand purpose of narration that Poppa claims is a family occupation, quite a translation of the hereditary offi ces of the West African griot. Yet, the machine is a marker of a particular modernity that is sharply juxtapositioned with the objects of art in Miss Malloy’s house. Despite this juxtapositioning, the fi lm does not reprise a recognizable form of third world and more specifi cally Latin American magic realism. Jameson’s defi nition is relevant for the light it throws on the entrance into modernity, and its debris that the fi lm captures. Turning to the modes of production and their manifestation in form, Jameson concludes:
The possibility of magic realism as a formal mode is consti- tutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present; or to generalize the hypothesis more starkly, magic realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of precapitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features. (Jameson 1986: 311)
In the context of the fi lm, the ancien régime of high capitalism exists in uneven terms with a rising monopoly capitalism even as the vast majority have no capital. Miss Malloy’s house, broken down as it is, fi gures the decline of a former high capitalism in a town in shambles, where even wages are not an option. Th e situation is further complicated because race and its historically unequal relationship to capital and the modes of production is not a factor in Jameson’s formulation. Th us, the fi lm’s modality works within the counterpoints of a perceived, but fl awed, sharper disjuncture between the nostalgia for capital and desire for technological features. Capital as such is imbricated only by its
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absence, and is signaled in culture by apophasis. Consequently, it is through cultural references that the disjuncture is revealed to be a lie, uncovered by the developing friendship between the Cruz brothers and Miss Malloy. Th e object itself of course became a work of art during a period of consumer capitalism, where the mode was high modernist, as with Fernand Léger’s paintings and his fi lmBallet Mécanique (1924). When the Cruz brothers go to Miss Malloy’s house to help restore it, they experience a nostalgia for a time represented by objects that they themselves had not experienced but which had been glamourized by the motion picture industry. Th e objects here then become detached from their referents, while the objects in the Cruz household retain their use and referential value. Th e melancholic nostalgia that both groups feel, however, ties the objects even more forcefully into the semiotic chain, almost sharing a past that historically they had not and, more to the point, could not have. Th eir being together in the present, in the aura of the objects, bridges the abyss between the woman who presumably had experienced those times and the boys who had no ken of them. Where Jameson stresses disjuncture, I would point to coexistence of diff erent spatialities and temporalities that is revealed through a Carpentierian marvelous modernism. All of them, the female throwback to high capitalism, the Puerto Rican boys who will likely never know what capital is, are in this modern moment where technology and object both narrate, where both have a longing for the time that is now and the time that is past. Seemingly separated by the chasm of race and time, their sense of being outside, of time for one, and of capital for another, links them to the universal. Th e fi lm presents the fi ssure between the Cruz brothers and Miss Malloy and, aft er the development of the friendship, the bridging of the chasm. Walking in single fi le through the darkness of the early dawn, the brothers come up against Miss Malloy’s mansion, brilliantly lit up and quite imposing, mysterious, but inviting, almost in deliberate contrast to the opening tracking in Citizen Kane (1941) where the house is forbidding. Th e low
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angle shot close to the building, the camera looking up to the roof of the house, catches the fl owers in the foreground. A cut takes us to a lotus pond, adding to the sense of a slight (ir)reality. Th e greens and the blood red of the lotuses in the pond are sharp and incredible, but are not unmoored from references, as Jameson would have it. Th e pond is a contrast to the derelict street the boys live in, and while the view of both the house and the pond is not sutured to the look of any of the boys, the narrative carries the weight, not of their visual stimulation but of their deeper under- standing of this new location. In terms of what Teshome Gabriel has theorized as “nomadic” thought, concepts of the real are not exclusively rooted in empirical seeing. He argues that the real is “both tangible/seeable and untouchable/unseeable. What is not necessarily seeable and touchable, but which nevertheless exists, is merely an extension of known reality” (Gabriel 2001: 396). Note that existence does not depend exclusively on our being able to see and touch it. Th e Cruz brothers wander into a new reality, incredible because it may be tangible or it may be eff ervescent. Th e camera slowly and hesitantly tracks towards Miss Malloy, and equally slowly tracks up to reveal her full fi gure. A cut to the boys shows them looking at her; they are separated by the pond. Yet, her opening words embrace them warmly: “Welcome, welcome to my house. I am so pleased you could come, boys.” Th e density of the foliage, its lushness, is not in the least paradisiac. As Miss Malloy says, it needs “sprucing up.” Th at it carries tinges of both the magical, or the electrically shocking, and the marvelous (the wonders of the existing) is undeniable, but the overall eff ect of magical and marvelous realism in the fi lm is created less by the mise-en-scène, a more conventional locus for the magical real, than it is by the proximity of the boys with Miss Malloy. Victor, for instance, insists on following Miss Malloy when she shows them her house, and picks Miss Malloy up when she falls in her dining room. Felix continues to work with his brother although he is more than a litt le alarmed by Miss Malloy’s strange use of words. While the mise-en-scène is not the main factor in the world delineated in the sequence, it adds a dimension to the marvelous
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Figure 4.1 Cruz Brothers: Miss Malloy greets the brothers
real occurrence of the encounters between the Cruz brothers and Miss Malloy. Th e very banal evening tea is turned into an extraordinary occurrence because of the cultural unpreparedness of the audience and of the characters in the diegesis for such an ordinary act across cultures. Th e sequence opens with a stationary camera showing the boys walking across a green clearing; the camera holds even aft er the boys have walked away from the clearing, and then shakily moves to show them by the water, on brownish- reddish rocks that the green clearing throws into relief. Th is simple transition from the house to the outdoors again privileges a narrative sensibility, following the boys’ thinking about this new job and the development of their relationship with Miss Malloy. It is only aft er this crucial narrative glue is provided that there is a cut that shows the boys working and talking, again about this new and unusual situation. An off camera voice announces tea time, and then again, the camera follows Felix rushing up and
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going to Miss Malloy before Miss Malloy walks into the space as though on to a stage, carrying a silver salver and goblets. Th at small move of not following up the off camera voice with Miss Malloy provides narrative space, an expansion that diff ers from uses of magical realism in the novel, notwithstanding the fi lm’s appropriation of literary narrative techniques. Th e novel would feature a rapid movement from one happening to another, linked by ineff able connections, particularly of family; and in fi lm, it would be a surfeit of visual imagery intended to be extreme. Rather, here, the pace is casual, and when the boys come up to get their ginger ale, the utt er naturalness of the image takes over. José, enthusiastic as usual, confi des in Miss Malloy that her house is like a movie, using exactly the same words he had used for their own rough-and-tumble lodgings. But the two houses could not be more diff erent. José’s comment refl ects a nostalgia for the movies that conjures up an aura, a glow of contentment in very disparate mise-en-scènes. Nostalgia fi lms use very specifi c mise-en-scènes, costumes, and props to produce a diff erent period. Th e Cruz Brothers is very fi rmly set in the present, but creates glimpses of a hypothetical past, avoiding att empts to construct the “real” of history. Th e “mood” of nostalgia evoked by the sett ing and objects in Miss Malloy’s house leads to that marvelous real of two coterminous times (Sprengler 2009). As magical realism is very oft en a function of the surface, so is nostalgia on screen. However, this scene out in the open neither off ers a present soaked in itself and denying the past, nor does it act to subvert the present, both possibilities in nostalgia fi lm as theorized by Jameson. Rather, the gaps in un- derstanding among the brothers on the past, and the brothers and Miss Malloy on the present, suggest a modernist mode of looking for both present and past. Th e nostalgia, tinged with both joy and melancholy, that impels Miss Malloy to retrieve the past through the sett ings and the surface translates in terms of the marvelous real for the brothers. While Miss Malloy recounts grand events held in the house with a touch of pathos, rooted in loss, José grins widely, concretizing and grasping the historical real submerged
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by movie nostalgia but apparent in this living character who appears to have stepped out of both the movies and her own past (Jameson 1991). Until recently, any whiff of nostalgia in fi lm was met with critical suspicion, particularly by Jameson, who argued that these fi lms packaged a past that existed only with references to surfaces and objects. However, Linda Hutcheon among others has pointed out that nostalgia also expresses a route to discerning the past (2003: 94). When José says poignantly, “We don’t have any records,” he is articulating a desire to have a usable past and, barring that, fi nding a past, even if it were not his own. Firstly, nostalgia for Miss Malloy’s memories aff ords the space for the marvelous real, but secondly, it also underlines the distance in the present; thus, Collins depicts the present real in complex terms that fold in coterminous temporalities and distinct ruptures. Miss Malloy’s nostalgia acts as the desire of the narrative and, in the Kristevan sense, the desire of the language of the narrative (Kristeva [1969] 1982: 56–7). It is her fancy to restore her place to its former glory, and when she ropes the boys in, they become part and parcel of her nostalgia fi lm but one with obtrusions that jostle the narrative line of nostalgia. She says, for instance, as she is recounting tales of parties in the house, that her husband was quite brutish during the day but acceptable in the evenings. She does not rush headlong into memories but says aloud, “Step gently into the past.” Her nostalgia is further complicated by a feeling of having mislaid the past, while wishing to reclaim it: “I am looking for my life. Will you help me look for it?” She says in a trance-like state to Victor that, “It is somewhere in the house.” And earlier, she had asked José if he felt drawn to the house. Th e house as a symbol of the anterior past being dragged into the past in the present convolutes any simple narrative line on nostalgia. A countervailing narrative thread threatens to ignore the impetus behind the restoration. Felipe systematically breaks the narrative fl ow when the nostalgic intersects with the marvelous, usually by loud bangings and clatt erings that brings the action to a halt. And then there is Victor, who seems to be supremely blitheful,
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merely seeing Miss Malloy as a slightly crazy person and the job as just a job. He repeats this twice to Felipe, easily accepting this relationship on those terms, but inevitably identifying the nostalgia house project as the only basis of their relationship with Miss Malloy. It is José who is most drawn into Miss Malloy’s world, at fi rst in jest, miming the movies, but later with some earnestness that adds richness and density to both their characters. Th ey start practicing romantic lines with each other and dancing, but the game is too dangerous for José, who fi nally cries out that they talk diff erently and that they think diff erently. Th e scenes that are marked by nostalgia are not in every instance meant to evoke pathos. When José fi rst sees the house, it does, but the conduit is the cinema. A later scene dwells on this motif by sett ing the action up to reconstitute a nostalgia movie scene. Dressed in period clothes, the brothers come wearing contrasting, old-fashioned suits: Victor in white and José in black. Miss Malloy is dressed in a white, fl owing dress recalling not just the 1950s but perhaps garden parties of an even earlier era, largely already imagined through the movies. Stumbling upon this scene during the middle of his jobbing day, Felipe is shocked and seems to have lost his bearings. Collins sets up a movie scene that has a spectator who absorbs the surface as the real, riveted by the exterior. Th e scene’s structural integrity in the diegesis is shatt ered when Felipe hoarsely calls a halt to the music and to the action of the scene being enacted. He appeals to a higher authority in calling for Poppa. Th e magical real is shatt ered even as all of them seem suspended between the real and the magical real for an instant. Th e mise-en-cadre of the dance sequence in the ground clearing is the stage for the limits of the association between the brothers and Miss Malloy. However, even as some of the codes of the nostalgia fi lm—the style of movement, the actors in a world of their own—are used, Felipe’s interruption places the moment in the present, bringing us back to the idea that the surface of the magical real insists on the presentness of the modern, thus counterbalancing the pastness of nostalgia fi lms. eTh modes of
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Figure 4.2 Cruz Brothers: Nostalgia or desire?
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the magical real put pressure on the trope of nostalgia to make use of it for the present. Poppa’s coda underlines these seemingly unruly crossings across time and space: “Th e spell is broken,” and crucially, their wallets are “fat.” But when he insists that his sons are legends, Victor, framed by the same window-space featured in the opening of the fi lm, snaps that this is not true, and that it had taken a bank robbery and a death to get them here; that there is nothing large about the Cruz brothers at all. Th e fi lm system- atically cycles back to the opening, the epic mythical structure belying Victor’s words. Th e brothers are left with a car as a legacy and their wages. Th e last sequence of their traipsing across the park, with the same soundtrack accompaniment, leaves us in no doubt, at least, of the existence of the marvelous real in the concrete trace of their friendship with Miss Malloy. Th e counterpoise maintained by the magical real and the marvelous real renders the narrative of the Cruz Brothers modernist in modality and in narrative. Th us, Jameson’s contention that the fi lm medium cannot anchor the narrative in the magical real modality is not accurate as a generalization. Th e fi lm’s modernist narration is contrived by use of tactics prevalent during the silent fi lm era.2 A brief look at the history of borrowings across the arts of fi lm and literature throws partial light on the “translation” of language that Collins sought. In Cruz Brothers, Collins avails of qualities in fi lm that were prominent during the silent era, patt erns that impressed themselves on modernist form, particularly with respect to the interiority she is able to narrate in the fi lm. A strain of fi lm criticism now holds that the modernist narrative in fi ction would not have been possible without its germination in fi lm, specifi cally because modernist techniques across the arts trumped all diff erences, while highlighting the extended possi- bilities of each medium. Eisenstein (1949), for instance, writes of how enthralled Joyce was to know of innovations Eisenstein was making in projecting interiority and the interior monologue. Apparently Joyce, although almost blind, insisted on watching
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these pieces, showing how infl uential formal experiments across modernist literature and fi lm are. Eisenstein recalls: “When Joyce and I met in Paris, he was intensely interested in my plans for the inner fi lm-monologue, with a far broader scope than is aff orded by literature” (1949: 104). Further silent fi lm through its use of intertitles without speech showed how silence could be used eff ectively in modernist narration, particularly to heighten one of its richest elements, ambiguity, and with it the possibility of change, or the open-ending. Th e silences in Cruz Brothers are caesuras that invite refl ection on the confl ict between a universalism that strains against the realist and an ethnicity spawned by exclusion: the standpoint of the two Cruz brothers and Miss Malloy on the one hand, and Felipe on the other. Th e dance scene in the clearing that is at once a nostalgia clip for the audience and a frightening reality for the spectator, Felipe, takes advantage of the rich philosophical possibilities engendered by silence, accentuated by the serene, gracious silence in the diegetic dance sequence. Th e soundtrack playing during the dance sequence is of a piece with nostalgia fi lmic codes, slow and based on Romantic music from the western classical music tradition. As in silent fi lms, the music functions as more than a mood piece and carries narrative weight in suggesting harmony, grace, design. When Felipe comes out of hiding and stares at them, the two Cruz brothers and Miss Malloy are silent and the narrative itself is held suspended in its dream-like state. Th e marvelous appears to cross over from the dancers on the green to the reluctant voyeur who hears the music, even though it has no diegetic source. And when he screams, “Stop the music,” we are met with a wholly diff erent silence that envelops them all. A punctum, the silence hints at thoughts and desires articulated in the only language available. Th e cinematography in this penultimate dance sequence is shot with a view to creating an aura of the enchanted. Medium shots place, fi rstly, Miss Malloy in the clearing ground, secondly, Victor, and then José. One close-up threatens the fragility of the magic when José crushes Miss Malloy to him, dragging in the here and now, once again almost, but not quite, interlacing
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two temporalities. Although Collins has to use cuts to show us José approaching the clearing ground, she relies on pans almost exclusively during the dance and includes all the characters in the shot when José intervenes. Th e magical realist–marvelous realist mode is enhanced by this cinematographic style that does not follow the shot/reverse shot paradigm, followed by cuts, to feed the narrative vehicle. Consequently, although the magical– marvelous realist mode seems incompatible with the essai fi lm’s traditional adherence to conversation to further ideas, the fi lm avoids the “what happens next” model to pause on how the characters’ emotional sensibilities are being developed. In lieu of reacting to the possibility of change through action, or dialogue, the fi lm uses realism and the magical marvelous to push its audience gently out of the specifi city of its own time and location.
Notes
1 Myth for Collins was to be diff erentiated from the “mythologizing” of black characters as sinners or saints, that is, as outsiders who are hollowed-out projections of the white psyche (Franklin 1980; Collins [1984a] 2015). 2 As a teacher of fi lm, Collins used silent fi lm extensively, and the eight short fi lms her students were asked to make had to be silent and highlight one particular formal element in the making of fi lm, an exercise that made her intensely aware of how to use silence to narrate (Collins 1984a).
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Collins’s use of magical realism in the 1980s is all the more incongruent, given that it was the heyday of the “New Realism” in African American fi lm, defi ned by time, specifi cally black people’s time, and urban mise-en-scènes. Th e fi lms in the realist-temporal paradigm—Boyz N the Hood, Juice, Straight Out of Brooklyn, Deep Cover—as distinct from the expressive- spatial, revolve around young boys becoming men (Diawara 1993: 23). Th at Collins should have chosen another route to initiate three Puerto Rican boys into a semblance of adulthood is perhaps more comprehensible when one regards magical– marvelous realism as a mode that provided her with a narrative solution, one that sorted out the story and, equally importantly, followed a universalist principle in the rudimentary forms that were expressed or stifl ed by the characters in Cruz Brothers. An “expressive” fi lm, it touches upon the male’s rite of passage into adulthood that the later “new realist” fi lms would. Collins’s trans- formation of the coming-of-age story was released in the early part of the decade when fi lmic imaginings of the Puerto Rican community and the Latinx community were predictably both vulgar and broad, continuing a patt ern established in the early part of the twentieth century (Lopez 1991; Woll 1981). Cruz Brothers is prescient about staging conversations in sharp contrast to the black–white, Latino/a–white relationships in the realist, time-oriented fi lms along the lines of Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) that “recognizes nationalist
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narratives as enabling strategies for survival, empowerment, and self-determination” (Diawara 1993: 9). Losing Ground, like Cruz Brothers, sidesteps the nationalist narrative, is even less invested in the national allegory, and identifi es the human as the core of storytelling: the story emerges from the individual’s place in the community, and the community’s response to the nation’s interpellation of marginal subjects. Even as the national is incorporated, its imaginary does not inform the narrative nucleus. Discussing the craft of fi lmmaking, Collins maintained that storytelling involves using language to sort out the narrative tangles human beings create. In other words, she does not allegorize race; rather, she pays att ention to black subjects and their diffi culties in the community and in the nation. Th e solutions she veers towards have universal applicability, an anomaly, in general, in the US since the 1960s, when one version or another of identity politics, not to detract at all from its progressive goals and results, has dominated. It is important to reiterate that the predicaments the characters fi nd themselves in arise from the ideas the characters have, rather than in the action or, as would seem expected for a drama, in confl ict (Nicholson 1988/9: 12). Losing Ground locates the dilemma of the text in the characters of Sara Rogers, a philosophy professor, and her husband Victor, an artist. Th e fi lm’s abstract plot pursues the relationship between questions of identity and philosophies of art. While this theme is developed in terms of the debate about the value of art and of philosophy, and the role of passion in both, there are other structural elements in the fi lm that add a particular gendered dimension to the essai fi lm—indeed, a feminist one—by importing Romance genre elements from literature and, oddly, romcom elements from mainstream fi lm, here mixed with African American traditions that reveal the limitations of each genre for the exploration of an intellectual black woman’s personal and professional life. Th e dimensions of the essai fi lm are expanded in that the existential speculations that Sara entertains of her identity are
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complicated by her internalizing her husband’s views on the insuf- fi ciency of her discipline, philosophy, which according to Victor inhibits her from accessing the complex fullness of the abstract and the sensory that he experiences. Th e fi lm follows Sara’s quest to discover the richness of the philosophical in mysticism. Her research follows this path, an untypical way of att empting to fulfi ll a quest. Moreover, this quest is entangled in the mundane of everyday married life: a commonplace interest in communicating with her husband who seems lost in a world of his own, and even less aware of her own needs, but drags her into his, dismissing her objections. Th at Collins intertwines these themes is signifi cant mainly because African American fi lms had only infrequently ventured to explore personal/romantic and intellectual relation- ships, in part because of the fi lm industry’s inability to conceive of black lives outside the racial imaginary. However, exploring inter-personal relationships, particularly in a romantic vein, is crucial to establish African Americans as human beings fi rst, who participate in the simple and simultaneously grand universal journey of love and its many anguishes. When asked what Losing Ground was about, Collins is reported to have said, “a young woman falling in love and making a mess of it” (Hachard 2015). Two generic strands intersect in this fi lm—essai and Romance— within an African diaspora framework.
The essai
Discussion of personal problems is ubiquitous in the essai fi lm, particularly conversations about relationships, starting with Godard’s Breathless (1960) where the two main characters lie in bed and talk about how many lovers they have had in the past in conjunction with what books they have read. Truff aut’s Jules and Jim (1962) is an extended elaboration of the development of relationships, largely predicated on character. And of course, the Rohmer fi lms that Collins admired are replete with long philosophical conversations that include soul searching about
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relationships. Th e human drama in these fi lms invariably revolves around some version of a romantic connection. Th is is certainly true of Losing Ground; however, there are very few conversations about relationships except obliquely through disagreements about art and philosophy. Th e viewer begins to grasp that these intellectual divergences also reveal Victor’s imperviousness to Sara’s world view, what Sara later clarifi es as the “unequal” nature of their relationship. Sara has a warm relationship with her mother, to whom she talks openly about Victor’s routine infi delity. eTh conversation between mother and daughter introduces the theme of black women’s community, a motif that is central to all Sara’s writings. As Sara confi des in her mother, their emotional and intellectual sustenance of each other as black women and black women artists becomes apparent. Sara spends less time talking about the object of her aff ections, Victor, than she does about her own work. She conveys the exuberance she feels when she knows intuitively that she has arrived at the heart of the matt er:
The actual sex doesn’t bother me . . . The only thing I’ve ever known like that [trance-like state] is sometimes in the middle of writing a paper my mind suddenly takes this tremendous leap into a new interpretation of the material . . . I know I’m right. I know I can prove it . . . my head starts dancing like crazy . . . (Collins 1991: 165)
Sara adds that she feels somehow despondent that the exultation is based on thinking and longs for that trance-like state for herself outside the strict purview of paper writing. Her response is in part informed by Victor’s unthinking refl ection of the western metaphysical binaries separating the intellect from emotion; yet, her engagement with the issue is feminist in that she questions these rigid oppositions that inevitably carry racial and gender assignations. She is in search of a history of philosophy that would enable her to comprehend both without sacrifi cing her training or succumbing to some western construction of black people as instinctual without the ability to think rationally. Th e issue is specifi c for Sara’s gender and ethnicity; it would not be so for the
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male intellectual in the western tradition, as seen in Rohmer’s My Night with Maud. While Rohmer follows the principle of not drawing att ention to the fi lm form lest it detract from the narrative and the discussion, Collins takes a diff erent tack, bringing in the verve of the dramatist in this conversation between Sara and her mother, an actor. My Night with Maud uses long takes to imitate the literary, and “subtle blocking” of the conversation between the three characters to underplay the cinematic in the sequence (Holland n.d.). Like Rohmer, Collins also avoids the repetitive shot/reverse shots that are routine in the Hollywood master/tutor code, and gently dollies from Sara to her mother during the conversation. Th e tone of the conversation could not be further from the debate in My Night with Maud. Sara and her mother are laughing, chatt ing, and discussing issues in an everyday way, thinking about themselves through ideas that are relatively new to them, but throughout saturated by their emotional sense of what the trance-like state might mean for each of them. Th ey are passionate about it, and there is considerable warmth in the exchange, modeling the development of ideas through empathy and affi rmation rather than argumentation. Th ey are not, so to speak, human beings who are vessels for abstract ideas which Rohmer’s characters, barring slight disturbances, appear to be, their actions fueling further thinking on moral issues. Th e protagonist of My Night with Maud is not given a name, suggesting his allegorical role. Sara and her mother are fl esh-and-blood creatures. When Sara describes her own transports, she moves her head forward, miming the dancing she feels her head undergoes when she is out of herself. Both leave the morality out of it entirely, her mother commenting that she does not know if it is the gods that “have” her or Satan. Th e visual palett e is startling diff erent from Rohmer’s; Collins uses color and the mise-en-scène to suff use the scene with a sense of warmth and life. Medium shots show the proximity of the two conversationalists and their intimacy. Th e notion of the essai fi lm in this context is expanded to seek out new philosophical positions that the women are in the process of discovering, not securing
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moral positions that have already been defi ned as in Rohmer. Losing Ground also distinguishes itself from the philosophizing in Godard’s Breathless, and from the social philosophy in Truff aut’s Jules and Jim, foregrounding race in the intricate connection between the philosophical idea and the gendered, raced self.
Romance
Th e Romance genre, and its off shoot in the American novel, are hostile to African American subject material. Th e sentimental novel of the nineteenth century followed a virtuous female, who during the course of the novel establishes her value to the male and is rewarded by his appreciation of her. Th e sentimental novel then always concluded with the marriage of the female hero to the object of her aff ections. For African American women writers in the nineteenth century, the plot was out of bounds, given that the defi nition of a virtuous woman was solely the property of euro-american women; the sexual assault and rape of black women consigned them to a class outside the virtuous, and even outside womanhood (Carby 1987). Consequently, novelists took recourse to the black woman’s “uplift ” work to prove her virtue and womanhood. Th is trope is picked up then by African American fi lm, including Oscar Micheaux’s oeuvreWithin Our Gates (1919) and Body and Soul (1925), which feature black female protagonists pursued by men, black and white. Th e female’s affi liation to the progress of her race fi nally redeems her, and in some cases culminates in marriage. Th us, given the weight of history against the female hero’s quest being completely fulfi lled, Collins opts against a utopian ending, giving us instead a modernist one, replete with ambiguity. Th is is compounded by the fact that the romcom dilemma of the communication channels between husband and wife also remains unresolved. Th e careful detailing of the diffi culties in the husband and wife’s romantic relationship is of moment precisely because it normalizes and humanizes black subjects in that most powerful of all arenas—the romantic.
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Th e trance-like experience as a quest motif is mystical, in not translating either into a treasure or a romantic object. Nevertheless, it does serve as the desire of the narrative. As the philosopher protagonist becomes more aware of her data’s over- whelmingly western framework, she is frustrated in her need to be transported to another state of mind. Underlining the importance of the experience of black women, it is Sara’s mother who brings up the possibilities off ered by non-western philosophies, touching on a key concept in Haitian philosophy, possession. Sara turns to Haitian philosophy, specifi cally Louis Mars’s work on possession in vaudun.1 Th e philosopher Louis Mars connects the emotional with the intellectual, noting that possession fi lls the subject with “the consciousness of an immediate rapport with desire” ([1946] 1977: 11). Moreover, the rite is deeply spiritual in that none other than the gods arrive in the service of the humans. Developing her ideas on a philosophy that emerges from Africa, in counterpoint to the time in the opening sequence devoted to western philosophers, Collins features yet another scene of Sara engrossed in the intellectual endeavor. Th e sequence of Sara in the library recalls the trope of literacy in African American literature; the material presence of books and paper suggests that for Sara, the intellectual, these instruments perform the same function that canvas and brush do for her artist husband Victor. A slow tracking shot catches the medieval statuary of monks, all a uniform rust-like color, before it lights upon Sara, her back to the camera, head bent over the typewriter, a sign of her engagement in creative activity. Halfway through, we hear Sara’s voice off screen, carrying the authority of the voice over. We listen to what she is typing, and even as she talks about the gods mounting the individual, the individual being possessed, the camera dollies upward to show a frieze. Th e art appears to be all european, familiar objects signifying “europe” in almost any context; yet the european backdrop here is a piquant reminder, both of the absence of the non-european in philosophy, and Professor Rogers’s contribution to expanding that canon. Aft er
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enumerating the stages of possession, Sara concludes her thesis saying that “the ecstasy is aft er the fact.” Louis Mars’s treatise on ecstasy through possession functions as a sub-text and introduces the informing myth, the vaudun ritual that culminates in the dance between Sara and Duke in the metafi lm. It is important to see how else vaudun performance rites make an entrance into the fi lm. According to vaudun myth, the gods possess those who have pleased them, and further, it is through dance that humans experience their presence: “In kinetic-emotive mysticism, a god reveals himself to man through the brutal breaking up of self” (Mars [1946] 1977: 15). Th e performative aspect of vaudun draws out the ecstasy of the dancer in the fi lm within the fi lm. Possessed by the gods/the ancestors, the dancer loses herself in the other. Th e dance itself is charged with meaning and operates on both the syntagmatic level and the associative or the Barthesian paradigmatic level (Barthes 1994). Th e ultimate dance that Sara has with Duke in the fi lm within the fi lm is to be distinguished from the previous dance she had with him during rehearsal, where the sequence shot against the background of a New York building largely appears to be what it is: a take for a movie. And when her “rival” comes, the whole is tepid and plebeian. Sara and Duke are chatt ing through this dance and the sequence itself is amusing and entertaining, giving no indication of the signifi cance of the theme of the dance in the plot of the fi lm. eTh last dance, however, is completely explosive in contrast, and when Duke (Johnny) starts dancing with the other girl, with the same sinuous moves, Sara (Frankie) blasts him away. Th e dance infers that Sara, “possessed” by Frankie, herself possessed by a spirit, shoots and kills her lover. At the associative or paradigmatic level, entire systems of signifi cation are condensed in the dance. Th e dance transports Sara into a trance akin to the experience of being possessed, challenging the western notions of the self that suff use Victor’s thinking. Victor’s version of the trance-like state celebrates the experience of the self, unlike the vaudun ritual that involves the
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self being inhabited by another. For Sara, the trance involves both the self and the other. In the diegesis, Victor has disparaged Sara for her dancing skills. Yet, here her dance is of a higher order, not comparable to Victor’s fl irtatious dance steps as prelude to sex. Sara’s dancing with Duke yields fresh insights about her character not just to Victor, the viewer on screen, but also to the viewers off screen. Th e passion inherent in the movements, particularly when Sara kicks her leg high, is a startling revelation of the wellsprings of the erotic in her. Th e directions for the dance, based on the African American ballad, add another layer of density to the performance, recalling a perennial trope of the betrayal of the black woman. Th e very inclusion of the musical in the folkloric roots Losing Ground in the African American oral/performative tradition, regarded as the “positive” site of instruction in comparison with the negative moorings of the visual. From a received feminist perspective, the spectacle of the dance, of the female performer, would seem to reify her as the old archetype of the female entertainer, the Jezebel, or in high culture terms, the tragic mulatt a. However, other feminist theorists have argued that when the male viewer in the diegesis is denied visual pleasure, as Victor is in this instance, the male gaze trajectory is less than relevant (Ramanathan 2006). Further, in terms of the syntagma of the narrative, the specularization of the black woman is irrelevant; indeed, it is her visibility that is at stake. In the dance, Sara, and other black women conjured up by her presence, is “seen.” Th e structure of the fi lm, and the use of the fi lm within the fi lm at the conclusion, is modernist in not committ ing itself to classical closure, and feminist in signaling that the resolution has served the female hero. Th e historical adds weight to the philosophical dimension of the vaudun rite. Where the vaudun ritual celebrates the gods’ possession of the individual, here it is an ancestral fi gure from a representation, rooted in the language and idioms of the people, that possesses her. Th e intensity of the dance summons Frankie, as it were, who blows Johnny away.
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During the course of her scholarly exploration of ecstasy, Sara Rogers seeks answers from a psychic. Coming right aft er Sara’s intense study of vaudun in the library when it seems that she has her thesis hammered out, the sequence of her visit to the psychic taps into Sara’s vague uneasiness about the future and a level of insecurity about the conclusion of her research. Off ered as a narrative possibility, the sequence links the psychic with the personal as Sara asks the psychic to read her metaphysical makeup. In place of the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy, or the marvelous realism of Th e Cruz Brothers, minor characters fulfi ll a function in the plot that bridges the unforeseeable and the everyday. To some extent they are what one critic calls “agents of narrative resolution to the Greek concept of moira” (Bruce Robbins qtd in Kurnick 2011: 89). Th e sequence links Sara’s increasingly urgent existential questions to the last scene of the fi lm where, as Frankie, she shoots Johnny. She walks into the female psychic’s arbor, an outdoor space in contrast to the many interiors, indicating the exploratory nature of the visit. Th ere she asks the psychic directly what she, the psychic, feels “inside” herself when she sees a person. Th e question returns to the notion of doubleness raised by the reading of Louis Mars but gets absolutely no response from the psychic, who says she does not understand. Sara then shift s to a diff erent theme that is more personal, yet framed by the impersonal. Can the psychic read her future? Th e psychic gives her a rendition of her meeting a tall, dark stranger with a top hat and being photographed with him. Th is reference to the fi lm within the fi lm where Sara would be paired with Duke is a seeming throwaway but does seem to prophesy a particular “destiny” for Sara. As a character, this is the psychic’s only appearance. She has no interaction with any of the other characters and, in that sense, does not enter the “character-system” of the fi lm, and barely takes up narrative space, in part because the space is located outside of the characters in the diegesis, thus adding to her what I call extra- narrative function, as revealer rather than motivator of action (Woloch 2003: 13). However, unlike Brechtian epic drama where the audience knows what will happen, here the scene is used to
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connect the realistic mode of the fi lm with the Romance aspect, only to be muddied again by the inconclusive fi nal scene with its overladen apparatus. Th e scene with the psychic ends in the most noncommitt al way. Sara walks away, back to her apartment and Victor; it would appear that nothing at all had happened. Th e psychic is not the only minor character whose role is easy to overlook in the fi lm. Several other minor characters, complicated by the motif of doubling as a discursive strategy, enlarge the fi lm’s philosophical thinking on black women. eTh modernist doppelgänger trope, two characters in the story who are alter egos, is amplifi ed by extending the trope to include multiple asymmetrical versions of doubling. Soon aft er the protagonist Sara and her husband Victor come to their summer place in upstate New York, Victor paints Sara in their apartment. She is seated in an embrasure in the window, her profi le partly lighted, accentuating the atelier atmosphere of the apartment. Th e scene purposefully imports the values of painting and, in its stillness, resembles one. Victor also paints Celia, a Puerto Rican woman he meets in the town. At the diegetic level, the two women appear to be foils, rather than doppelgängers, because of the diff erence in their personalities. However, the fact that Victor is painting Celia equates Celia and Sara at the structural level, both models for the male artist. Th at the two women serve as subject material for the male artist is not the only indication of doubling between them. Th e second instance is more complex, as it involves the fi lm within the fi lm and brings us into the terrain of versions or covers of women. Celia is glimpsed dancing by the water on her own, again out in the open, and shot using cinematic techniques. When Sara later, in the fi lm within the fi lm, dances, we are met with an almost uncanny doubling: of Celia and Sara, and of Sara and Frankie. Th e doubles in the fi lm are not exact replicas or “covers.” Th e traditional double is simultaneously subject and somebody other, someone who stalks the subject like death. Th e characters in Losing Ground are tangential doubles, so that when Sara “becomes” Frankie, the question is not whether Sara dies but
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Figure 5.1 Losing Ground: Sara and Duke in the metafi lm
whether she has come to life, following the ancient rite of vaudun where the subject is inhabited by the gods. Th e double questions the original characterization of the subject and casts representa- tion into a crisis. Th e doubling does not arise naturally, or from the diegesis, as in traditional doppelgänger fi lms such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dir. Mamoulian, 1931) and thus is anti-mimetic, lift ing the character out of the diegesis and provoking philosophi- cal questions outside of identity, and of the provisionality and threat of being itself (Mellier 2018). Th e “doubling” that Sara enacts, or experiences, pushes us into the realm of the unconscious, the cinema its metonym. One is tempted to theorize the postmodern here because of the proliferation of images; however, replicas do not carry their own identities. Celia and Sara do. Th us, the doppelgänger motif is within the purview of that modernist theme of “the secret sharer”: Celia and Sara’s presence as minority women. Where Sara’s doubling as Frankie is featured within the extra-diegetic, Frankie,
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as the literary source, escapes both the diegetic and the extra- diegetic, the uncanny ghost in the diegetic, whose very existence in the historical and social is transmuted by her story and spirit being channeled here. Even as a minor character, Frankie’s role is multivalent; she represents the betrayed black woman in the folk ballad in all its rich socially concrete dimension. She also invokes moira, or destiny for colored women, brought into the mix by Celia, serving as a double for Sara. Th e doubling is further densely layered when we consider yet another colored female minor character, the female who plays the role of Frankie’s rival. Within this design, as a double she plays the “other woman.” Th e asymmetry of the doubling here is critical for it helps us understand that the rival is a double of Celia, but since Celia herself is a double of Sara, the distinctions between the women fall apart. In the penultimate sequence that Frankie and Johnny dance, Johnny fi rmly drags Frankie to the side and makes his way to her “rival,” but the ease with which he does it shows that this dancer too will be cast aside. Th e asymmetry of the doubling links
Figure 5.2 Losing Ground: Johnny betrays Frankie
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the women, including Sara’s mother, and sets them on the other side of any romantic interchange. Th e asymmetrical doubling of the men is striking in pointing to the allegorical role of an important minor character, Duke. Collins had prepared the audience for this role in the manner in which she presents Duke when Sara fi rst encounters him in the library. Duke literally appears out of nowhere, talks philosophy fl uently, mentions psychics when telling Sara who he is:
In this life I’m an out-of-work actor, who once studied for the ministry, in other lives. . so the psychics tell me, I’ve been an Italian count, an English Lord, even a Confederate soldier. Apparently this is my fi rst incarnation as a Negro . . . (Collins 1991: 141–2)
His introduction openly brings in the otherworldly, and his stature, as he stands over Sara working in subdued lighting in the library, is a deliberate nod to a mysterious character, with subtle intimations of a sinister cast. His clothes too are so much a contrast to the clothes of the other men in the fi lm that one is uneasily aware that he may not be entirely substantial in the mortal world. Diegetically, this suspicion is allayed by his being the uncle of Sara’s student; nevertheless, visually the image remains paramount. Th us, his allegorical role is resealed in the fi nal dance with Sara. Given that the psychic had predicted the appearance of the tall dark stranger, and it is when Sara dances with Duke that she feels the impact of Frankie’s passion, Duke too is in the guise of a Fate, spelling destiny. Th e minor characters function as intersectional points that bring the essai and Romance in dialogue. However, it appears a failed venture, as is the more substantial research into the mystical visionary tradition. Yet, the female hero has reached the end of her quest, which, while successful in the extra-diegetic sequence of the dance in metafi lm, is unaddressed except through the dance in the metafi lm. Th is narrative solution is one in keeping both with the character and her creative search, and the constraints placed on African American women by the genre of Romance.
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In the context of the sustained development of the plot around the artist/philosopher couple’s diffi culties, it is noteworthy that Victor’s characterization does not follow any of the fetishized fi gurations of black masculinity, or even what Mark Reid dubs the “negritude” version which essentializes black masculinity (Doy 2000; Reid 1997). Victor is allowed to be a human being, not a caricature. Very oft en, the charge laid against women fi lmmakers is that the male characters are utt erly unrealistic. To some extent, this is true of fi lms that privilege the point of view of women; for example, Dulac’s Th e Smiling Madame Beudet and Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence (1982). Th e criticism itself is blind to how so-called “realistic” representations of women in fi lm merely use the codes of realism to depict women; quite diff erent from presenting them outside male lenses. For the black woman fi lmmaker, such point of view, personalized, intimate depictions of a husband or male lover are not viable, for they could shore up derogatory stereotypes of black men. Not only would that end be undesirable, but it would also certainly detract from the personal romantic dilemma that is one of the topics of the fi lm. A key feature of the modern romcom as seen in the Nancy Meyers fi lms are the glossy interiors, the highly polished surfaces, the kitchen spaces that women are in, a refl ection of their talent and their affl uence. Th e interior mise-en-scènes that envelop the world of the female hero in the Meyers corpus place her in a space that she is comfortable in, even as it has aspects that suggest that it is a staged sett ing for her own persona. Interior mise-en-scènes have always been an issue for women in African American fi lm, given that their fi xed location was usually in the kitchen. Yet, Collins chooses to make Losing Ground almost exclusively in interiors. Elizabeth Alexander explains that the interior functions very diff erently for black women: the interior is a place where the aesthetics of the woman can be expressed. Th erefore, the space is one where the self is made “visible,” the living room particularly functioning as a “theatrical space, and, in a still visual realm, a space for tableau or retablo, with its connotations of the sacred” (Alexander 2004: 9). Alexander suggests that this kind
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of presentation is at the core of what curator Valerie Cassel calls Black Romanticism. In the catalogue for the Harlem Museum’s exhibition “Black Romantic,” Cassel (2002) argues that “Black Romanticism should not be dismissed as fi ctionalised nostalgia” particularly because it “engages aspects of a vernacularism reservoir.” In the fi lm, the interiors are expressive of the male artist rather than the female philosopher. While expressive, the interiors are not Romantic. Given the mise-en-scènes of most Hollywood fi lms featuring African American spaces, the decorative interiors of the two black New York artists would appear fi ctionalized to audiences of the 1980s. Contrary to the expectations of the romcom genre that uses aesthetic interiors to frame the female hero, and as noted earlier, Sara’s presence—her visibility—is less than apparent when she is posing for Victor, seated in a window embrasure in one corner of the room. Sara is freer when she is dancing with Duke in a huge open-air space. Insofar as interiors are concerned, Collins does not set much stock by domestic interiors within this specifi c Romantic orientation, but is invested in black women occupying public institutional spaces, such as the library. Most fi lm critics would concede that opening sequences both frame the themes of a fi lm and introduce the main lines of inquiry, or as Annett e Insdorf argues, they highlight the “thematic concerns and stylistic approach . . . that will be developed throughout subsequent scenes” (2017: preface). Losing Ground opens with Sara lecturing to her students, in command of the space. Th us, the fi lm to some extent folds the anti-romcom genre into the essai fi lm. Th e perils of romance are severely underlined by Victor’s casual, perhaps unthinking, questioning of the creative importance of Sara’s philosophical writing, and then further, in the equally casual entitled way Victor humiliates Sara in front of their guests. Rather, intellectual companionship—the friendship between Sara and Duke, and Sara and the student George—is valued. As a minor character, George is perhaps what narratologists might call “fl at”; his purpose is purely instrumental in sett ing up the vaudeville “silent comedy” (Woloch 2003). But as discussed in
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Chapter 2, the fact that he, because of being the fi lm’s director, is also the surrogate auteur is important in bringing us back from the fate-ridden Romantic tale to the overall modernist exit of the fi lm. Th e scene itself is marked as extra-diegetic by the director’s instructions, and the illusion of the cinematic rent by an abrupt cut, showing Victor’s car. Even as Frankie and his partner dance, George, the director, interrupts with suggestions for precise moves. A cut-in brings Sara into the scene, watching the couple dance. George gives her the fi nal cue. A close-up of Sara’s face shows her fear, uncertainty, and anguish. She shoots. Victor reels at the impact. We cut back to Sara, and then to Victor. Both experience some recognition. Sara, we are clear, has experienced ecstasy. Th e question of “what happens next” remains unanswered. Rather, the modernist narrative solution creates space for new philosophies for African American women; hence, none of the generic strands of the fi lm, including the philosophical, fi nds full closure.
Note
1 Collins had translated Louis Mars from the French to the English.
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If Collins had been successful in integrating the other performing arts in her fi lms, it was in part due to her extensive experience in drama and her literary eff orts, including fi ction and screenplays. Her formal instruction in fi lm and her teaching of the craft of fi lmmaking further enabled her to manipulate each of the arts to enrich the other; to translate stagecraft to fi lmic properties, to transpose fi lmic values to herwriting. Her interest in the relationship between art and fi lm goes back to her doctoral work in the Sorbonne where her thesis was looking at the conceptual eff ects of borrowings across the arts with reference to André Breton and “the cinematic notion behind surrealism as they practised it” (Klotman [1982] 2015). Critics have only very recently identifi ed the integration of the arts in her fi lms (O’Malley 2019). Scholars of silent cinema/primitive cinema have argued that the practitioners of the newest art, whether a Griffi th or a Murnau, were engaged in an unconscious internecine warfare with the other representational arts, particularly theatre/ literature and painting, fi lm’s ancestors. Th is “rivalry” was very oft en interwoven into the themes of silent fi lms and the rivalry “sett led” in the diegesis itself. Wanting to legitimize itself as a serious art, not just a bastard descendent of vaudeville, fi lm turned to literature, particularly eff orts to formalize the narrative apparatus, to achieve literary status. If these early fi lms, such as Griffi th’s Broken Blossoms (1919) and Robert Wiene’s Th e Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), exhibited this tension between the arts,
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Collins’s fi lms reveal the unifying powers of the arts. Even among the New York Black Independents, several of whom embed at least one other art, very oft en photography, Collins is distinctive in using painting, theatre and literature, and fi lm in both her fi lms. Th us, the fi lms carry the aesthetic aluesv of all three media, even as they fulfi ll their narrative and philosophical functions. Th e fi lm’s borrowings from painting have not gone unnoticed by critics: “Post-modern and anti-realist, the fi lm has the look and feel of a painting” (Williams 1994: 38). Th e deliberate pictorial quality of the fi lm could be viewed as “postmodern” in its self- refl exivity about art and in the caesuras to narrative progress; however, the fi lm is not anti-realist in terms of the defi nition it sets up for what constitutes realism for black artists. Given the defi cit paradigm of African American art in art history, and the paucity of “art” in mainstream fi lm dealing with African Americans,Losing Ground purposefully brings the richness of diverse artistic modes together, suggesting possibilities for other African American “art” fi lms (Th ompson 2000). Th e abstract confl ict inLosing Ground is between philosophy and art. When the fi lm opens, however, their complementarity is established using the materials of philosophy and of art. In both cases, the materials also evoke a key physical element in the delivery of fi lm—the screen. Sara stands with her face half turned to the blackboard, one arm extended to point to something she has writt en, the words on the board/screen. A double role is presented here directly: the viewer outside the screen and the viewer who, like the famous Woody Allen character in Th e Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), steps into the screen. Th e viewer/student gets a lesson on existentialism. Th e professor’s detached knowledge of the discipline is combined with the human subject’s passionate involvement with “thought” and “absurdity.” Th e topics of discussion—the depths of “being” in Sartre, the absurd in Camus—glide by imperceptibly to be developed by the professor’s dialogue with students on the motif of the outsider. Of the three French writers mentioned, all are philosophers and also major writers of the twentieth-century
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Figure 6.1 Losing Ground: The second screen
modernist literary canon. Genet merits the greatest discussion, Sartre some, and Camus is mentioned only once. Nevertheless, the intertextual reference to Meursault, the stranger, is provocative in drawing to our mind the story of a pied-noir in Algeria, neither an Arab nor completely a colonial Frenchman, locating the text in the interstices of a duality that is discomfi ting even when the protagonist is part of the colonial establishment. Buried in the layers of the modernist narrative is the story of the native outsider, the Arab, native to Algeria but a foreigner in his own land, shot for no reason other than being in the land. Th e discursive allusion to the invisible native makes connections across a spectrum to enable scrutiny of colonialism. Th at Sara speaks so passionately about the plight of the outsider and his/her universal qualities shows the easy fl ow to and from philosophy and literature in the fi lm’s opening exposition and statement. Th e next major sequence almost schematically introduces the second term, art, in the abstract confl ict between philosophy and
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art. A medium shot shows a camera slowly taking in the walls with ferns on the table, colorful fabrics, a red sofa, a profusion of colors topped by a small painting, and then at the dead center of the room a huge painting that takes over the whole wall. Th e functional and ornamental items in the artist’s studio seem to be part of a canvas, but an animated one, as the camera is mobile. Unlike Julie Taymor’s fi lm on Frida Kahlo,Frida (2002), where stillness dominates many of the set-ups to mimic painting, here the fi lming overpasses the static but retains the quality of the pictorial. Th e set-up’s co-relation to the fi rst sequence is clarifi ed by the camera pausing to show us Sara’s artist husband, who in a pose that matches Sara’s, is astride a ladder, painting. His face is turned away completely from the audience, and his right arm is raised as he paints on the oversize canvas that covers the wall completely. Th e canvas, analogous to the blackboard, is as a screen here, if a litt le less accessible than the screen/board had been in the fi rst sequence. Crowded or almost completed as the canvas is, it allows less room for one to enter into it, or even to let one’s imagination run. When the camera swivels all the way over the artist husband Victor’s head to the entrance of the room, we see a few more paintings, all with splashes of color, creating the fullness of what André Bazin called the importance of décor in fi lm as distinct from drama: “As Jean Paul Sartre, I think it was said, in the theatre drama proceeds from the actor, in the cinema it goes from décor to man” (1967: 102). Bazin is invested in the realism of the décor that is crucial for our understanding of the complexity of human dramatic action, as in the case of the fi nal swamp scene in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958); however, even a scene that looks as though in part it were a painted set is served well by sett ing up an objective co-relative between the sett ing and the subject. Collins makes this connection between décor and subject for both Sara and Victor. Enhancing the complementarity of the arts, both scenes are balanced by distance and closeness. A radio voice over brings the auditory lett er into the scene; at the philosophical level, the discussion is as abstract as, if not more so than, the classroom
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philosophical interrogation. Victor is listening to a talk on the relationship between art and philosophy: “A whole category of philosophical problems revolve around those abstract defi nitions of what is or is not acceptable as art.” Th e meta-refl exive sus- pension of that question is pursued by the fi lm at the level of the diegetic interaction between characters, but also in its own fi lming process, contributing to the text’s philosophical drive. Th e parity between the two sequences is not least because of the mobile camera, which as the third ever present art in the scene holds pride of place in both sequences. Th e latt er is worth emphasizing because shift s in the use of the mobile camera not only enhance the eff ectiveness of the scene but also carry weight in commentary on the relationship across the pictorial, literary, and cinematic. Borrowing from theatre where sett ing and blocking are crucial to the action of the play, the fi lm develops narrative through set décor pieces but uses obvious fi lmic references to convey ideological and philosophical values. A word about the derivation of this perspective on the role of the arts in fi lm and their status in the diegesis may be helpful. In approaching silent fi lm in terms of the “rivalry” between the arts, Brigitt e Peucker evaluates each art in the hierarchy of discourses in the fi lm, and even more fascinatingly returns to the diegesis to tie each art to a gender. Using F. W. Murnau’s fi lms, she argues that painting, the still art, is sealed by the narrative, rendering painting feminine, and narrative, usually aligned with the camera and its power to narrate, the masculine. Given that the abstract confl ict in Losing Ground is between philosophy/literature and art/painting, and that at the level of the diegetic the tension is between a woman and a man, the connections between the diegesis and the mode of art it privileges at any point reveal the aesthetics and the ideology of the text (Peucker 1995). Th at Sara as a character is closely aligned with fi lm works at several diff erent levels. On the one hand, the iris shot of her taken by the student would-be fi lmmaker, George, lingers on her as she is unaware, leading us to assume that this is a classic voyeuristic
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shot. In this reading, the female would be the pictorial, the male cinematic, with aesthetic values corresponding to their genders. Although the student does not have a camera, mitigating that parcel of authority, he has an old-fashioned monocle, and, in general, any extra viewing apparatus trained upon a woman is an exercise of male power. However, these neatly assigned gender values do not fall into place easily. Sara is, for instance, in her offi ce, separated intellectually and spatially by a huge table; he is almost crouching, he is the supplicant. Th is very basic reading of power relations in the scene does not tell the whole story, as Collins draws our att ention to fi lm as an art form. The student compares Sara to Pearl McCormack in Th e Scar of Shame. Th e student wants the professor to act in his student fi lm. us,Th the urgent plot question is reshaped: will Sara act in his fi lm, or not? Film then has come to occupy center stage, and Sara herself is to some extent on trial to see if she will move beyond the traditional arts. As referred to earlier, Th e Scar of Shame is about a tragic mulatt a, a theme that will be reprised in the student fi lm that Sara participates in as the folk hero Frankie. And here is where those binaries of the pictorial and narrative as feminine and masculine break down altogether, as Collins, in this association between the female and the pictorial, dignifi es the black female star as a great artist of the silent fi lm era. atTh reference is crucial to the fi lm; it is not merely intertextual, but acts as an active infl uence in the fi lm. Th e theorization about the female’s pictorial values, and her consequent relegation do not appear to obtain in the diegesis as a consequence of the comparison with Pearl McCormack, who plays the bourgeois black woman. Th at sleight-of-hand introduction of African American fi lm history with a complete att ribution— date and name of production company: Philadelphia Colored Players, 1927—establishes the importance of its existence, and most importantly, that black women were seen and, as result of preservation eff orts, can still be seen on the silver screen. Th e theme is further augmented by a reference to Dorothy Dandridge in the 1953 MGM fi lm Bright Road (dir. Mayer). Black women playing a sympathetic role is very oft en an absent, magnifying the
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importance of McCormack’s presence in a fi lm such asTh e Scar of Shame and rendering irrelevant the pictorial = feminine = power-less in terms of ideological dispersal. Sara is now aligned with fi lm and Pearl McCormack has eff ected a switch whereby the central art in the fi lm, cinema, is gendered feminine. eTh question of what is “acceptable” as art, posed earlier, is answered by the radio voice over that declares the black artist’s only “mandate” is to “interpret that which is real to him in a meaningful way.” Th e answer, broad as it is, yokes black art and universalism together under the rubric of an authentic “realism,” by which the commentator means that any method or mode is acceptable if the artist seeks to communicate his/her reality. Th e equal weight given to the painting/offi ce sequences is consonant with Collins’s stated beliefs that like McCormack, all black artists have the liberty to enact their reality the way they choose (Collins 1984a). Sett ing itself becomes a matt er of contention between the philosopher wife and the artist husband when he wishes to spend the summer in upstate New York. Sara comments that Victor “would like it there. It’s like a painting,” and says that she needs a library. Th e sett ing then is instrumental as a backdrop for both the cinematic uses of the literary and the pictorial, and their ability to off er transcendence. Th e low-key quarrelling about location becomes sharper when Victor jokingly says, “Would you like to put this mulatt o crisis on hold?,” referring back to those themes in the movies. Abstract painting, and painting, holds greater sway over him, the implication being that fi lm is a lesser art. Th e potential of each art to convey authenticity, and of black art to do so, is repeated in the discussion between the actor mother, the daughter, and the son-in-law. Th e mother scoff s at the plays she acts in, which fall into stereotypical black patt erns: the black matriarch, her grip over the family, and her belief in God. She would rather “play a real Negro woman who thinks more about men than God.” Th is particular dinner scene is used to convey that what we see unfold over the dinner table is real, and that if we had expected to see a predictable female role, our very expectations constrain the expansion of black female representation. Th e dinner
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scene sequence is imported from drama, the witt y conversation used to entertain the audience. Bazin’s comment that in drama the actors are central, the décor is not, is relevant; for this is the fi rst time we see the two chief characters engage in social conversation. Th e camera is not intrusive, except for a close-up of Sara, very diff erent than the student’s “close-up.” Th e close-up is one of very few close-ups in the fi lm, but itdoes underline the cinematic art’s power to reveal more than what the dialogue does; however, dramatic convention dominates, the camera follows the dialogue, spotlighting the actor when it is her turn to speak. Again, the balance between the arts is harmonious. It is also noteworthy that editing is used to commandeer the theatrical space of the dining room table for the women, Victor being out of the frame for the more serious part of the conversation. Following an earlier thread regarding gender assignations to the arts within the diegesis of a fi lm, theatre is fi rmly feminized, not surprisingly, given Collins’s overwhelming involvement with the arts of theatre.
Figure 6.2 Losing Ground: Tableau vivant
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Because of the relative lack of movement of the characters, the dining room sequence could be seen as a tableau vivant. Tableaux vivants were common acts for traveling groups before the advent of cinema. Th e poses of the actors modeled the still painting; they then surprised the audience with their movement (Wiegand 2015). Still tableaux were very common in early twentieth-century drama too; just before the curtains were drawn the actors stood in frozen poses. Th e theatrical sett ing of the dining room, with its interpositioning of another art form associated with painting, layers the sequence even as the conversation winds backwards to Victor’s sentiments about modernist art and the mother’s about contemporary plays. Th is sequence synthesizes many of the inter-arts elements that Collins uses to provide a diegetic space for the women characters in the arts, and to represent their ability to inhabit and to shape them. Th e dialogue across literature, painting, and fi lm serves as a discursive vehicle to narrate the story of Losing Ground. In addition to including the theatre, Collins brings in dance. Dance fi gures in the diegesis and as fi lm performance in the extra-diegetic. Vaudeville, as fi lm performance in the extra-diegetic, is also folded in, almost as though to pay homage to the cavernous jaws of fi lm that can chew and absorb it all. Th e dialogue, if mockingly, off ers a philosophy of fi lm and its relationship to the same elements that Victor had associated with abstract art. While rehearsing for the fi lm within the fi lm, Sara and Duke discuss the nature of the fi lm, not without considerable wryness. Duke wants to know if this is an avant-garde fi lm, to which Sara, presumably quoting the student fi lmmaker, says that fi lm is about the relationship of the characters to space and light. Two of the dance sequences between Sara and Duke are rehearsals, a third is a social dance. Sara and Victor never dance. In addition, Nellie Bly, playing the role of Frankie’s competitor, dances with Duke in the extra-diegetic fi lm and is left hanging when Frankie blows Johnny away. Th e chain of dizzying substi- tutions is also fi edtt in by the fi lm, particularly with the aid of the fi lm within the fi lm. eTh dispersal of femininity across three
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women and one ghost woman feminizes all the arts, but not as in the early male-directed fi lms, as passive, but as mobile, with the added virtues and abilities of the moving picture. Victor it is who is passive in the last dance sequence, but he too is granted grace, as the viewer who understands the power of art and who becomes aware of the artistic prowess of women, a revelation for the “artist” who has thought of them as models and, without putt ing too fi ne a point on it, objects of visual pleasure. In going through some of the incomplete resolutions of the fi lm through the metafi lm, the characters in the diegesis and the viewers acknowledge the moment of shock over the new, what the modernists called ostranenie, or strangeness. And in that moment, it is apparent that art is not “pure” but impure, mixed in with multiple desires and modes, conscious or unconscious; fi nally, that art is in the process. Dance crosses into the extra-diegetic as among the most dynamic of the arts, for in the retelling of the Frankie and Johnny ballad, the dance tells the story, availing of literature’s ability to tell a story over time, and painting’s to visualize imagery in space, revealing the same capacities as the art of fi lm. eTh fi lmic reference, the motif of the tragic mulatt a, is mixed into the dance. Th e harmony of the arts is suggested through an exceptional use of synesthesia in the central dance sequence in Th e Cruz Brothers. Th e soundtrack plays music for Miss Malloy in the clearing, being claimed for a dance fi rst by Victor and then by José. Felipe, wandering in, literally wails for the music to stop, and it does. A synesthetic eff ect is created by Felipe’s reaction. However, Felipe is not the only one to have “heard” the music; it is clear the other three do too, as they dance in time to the music they cannot possibly hear. Th e auditory is then signaled by the visual for the characters in the diegesis, and its impact experienced by the audience as synesthetic. Collins’s fi lms provoke a synesthetic response by their rich translation of sound into sight, and vision into sound, as part of what Merleau-Ponty explained as the response of the “whole sensory being” (Szaloky 2002: 25). Collins was familiar with
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this phenomenological approach, arising from existentialism, philosophies that would have been central in her studies at the Sorbonne (Klotman [1982] 2015). Th e characters in the diegesis while dancing respond to auditory impulses that are largely initiated by visual elements that would appear to be extraneous to sensory stimuli, the clothes, the careful movements, the gestures of the dancers following unheard melodies. Th e diff erence of course is that we hear the music. Th is particular form of synesthesia is to be diff erentiated from visual hearing; for instance, music, or audible sounds that evoke visual images. A recent example of visual hearing in the jazz music world is the Josh Lawrence Quartet, a group that evokes the painter Kandinsky’s colors and form through the line of the music. Th e dance sequence in Th e Cruz Brothers suggests “the mental hearing of visually perceptible sounds” for the characters in the diegesis, and conveys the magical and uncanny features of the experience to us who can both hear and see, and thus are privileged to be at the juncture of the visual auditory, the aural ocular, and the complete complement of the visual and the auditory. Th e use of synesthesia as a technique draws our att ention to how the arts produce eff ects in the viewer. In other words, the scene mentioned above shows the eff ects of synesthesia upon the characters in the diegesis. Th ese eff ects are based on the viewer being what Vivian Sobchak calls “a cinesthetic subject” (Szaloky 2002: 114). Th e notion of the cinesthetic subject is rooted in the idea of embodied subjectivity. Countering the visuality thesis prevalent in cinema studies, Jonathan Crary argues that viewers of the Impressionist paintings were not merely interpellated as Cartesian subjects, but experienced the painting through the sensations of the body; thus, their responses to the modernity of the paintings cannot be att ributed solely to the visual. Th e perception of one sense is received by the cinesthetic viewer through more than one sense (Crary 1999). Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy addresses a cinesthetic subject, and demands that we respond to the fi lm using both visual and sensory perceptions. Of course, it could be argued that
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all art works demand this response to a greater or lesser extent; however, the Collins fi lms strive for what the 1920s european modernists called the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” literally the “total art” work, but a more apt term might gesture towards synthesis in the work of art. Th e opening sequence of Th e Cruz Brothers is a synthesis of auditory elements that involve several of the arts: literature, drama, music, and fi lm. eTh titles in cursive, fl ashy, jagged writing are an acknowledgment of writing and the literary. Th e introductory dialogue by Victor fulfi lls an expository function by explaining the action, hotwiring the cars, and sett ing up any dramatic confl ict. Th e literary is combined with the fi lmic by sound; Poppa’s voice over is both a hallmark of the possibilities of sound fi lm, but also adds a layer to the density of the narrative. Ominous cinematic sound eff ects imply that the easy hotwiring plan may be thwarted. And in the meanwhile, the soundtrack plays Latin music to the accompaniment of Victor in the diegesis talking to an extra-diegetic, invisible interlocutor. A loud crash of the car, followed by the young Cruz brothers running, their backs to the camera, catches the agility of movement. A dramatic pop of a gunshot marks the beginning of the auditory fl ashback, the visual completely suspended by the gunshot, the frame empty and blacked out for close to 20 seconds. Th e visual is overmatched by the auditory in this sequence; whereas in the dance sequence visual surplus leads to the auditory, here auditory surplus uses the absence of striking visual detail to interject itself as a vital element in the storytelling process, the narrative, or the literary. Th e auditory, the dialogue in theatre that Collins was practiced in, is transmuted in the fi lm where two voices engage with each other, and present asides to the audience, but the eff ect is fully cinematic in that the camera moves wavily along showing us the houses that Victor is talking about to his invisible father, even as he tries to get his tape machine on to record his thoughts. Th e two voices, the disagreement between father and son, simultaneously approximates the confl ict of the theatre and the stream of con- sciousness of the novel, synthesized by the camera that greedily
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brings in the stillness of painting by capturing the pictorial qualities of the houses in the neighborhood. Th e inclusion of the neighborhood mixes the private with the public, the interior with the exterior, for houses in and of themselves are the central focus of the fi lm, sites where the interior and exterior intersect. Th e visual is not absolutely essential to establish presence. Victor’s father is never visible, but constantly present, and also an active narrator of the fi lm. Th e fi lm uses auditory presence and absence as a powerful structuring element in the development of narrative and enhancement of mood. Victor’s interiority is also revealed through the auditory, the tape machine he speaks into; his interlocutor his invisible but auditorily present father. One of the routine functions of the soundtrack is to heighten the viewer’s cinesthetic subjectivity by augmenting the emotions and sensations evoked by the diegesis of the fi lm. eTh story then is enhanced. In general, the narrative function is not taken over by a piece of music in the soundtrack except in Hollywood musicals and in the song and dance sequences of the Bombay Hindi fi lm. Th e narrative of the Cruz brothers is carried by a song in one of the more semiotically charged sequences of Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy when the brothers walk over the side-ropes of the bridge, a steep plunge into certain death, if there is a misstep. Th e song is jaunty and opens when the brothers make their way to the parks. While the object of a character’s vision can be easily signaled in the fi lm through the suturing process, one that Collins seldom uses in a straightforward way, the ability to signal what is the object of a character’s hearing is not so deliberately marked, even when the source of the sound is diegetic. Th e song begins “We’re brothers,” adventuring brothers who are balancing on an impossibly slender rope with sticks, picturing the joy of their being high in the sky, the very low angles silhouett ing them on the rope, fi rst as one brother passes the danger point, and then the next. A brief dramatically close-up shot of Victor introduces the next phrase as Victor’s acoustic sound picture: “But every now and then I wish / that from my father just a fewer seeds were sown.” Th is is quickly followed by a “Hey” objecting to that line, the response
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even more rapid, “Just kidding.” Th at they can hear this music almost escapes us at the moment, for we can hear it. Th e visual here composes the auditory, the joyful bridge crossing creating the certainty that the brothers can hear this music. Employing a technique much used in silent fi lms such as Murnau’sSunrise to simulate sound eff ects, this sequence doubles the sound eff ect of both heard and unheard music. Th e music carries the charge of Victor’s narrative of the family, adding another narrative layer to his thoughts as he records them on his tape. Th e shot that links Victor’s interiority to the viewer’s visual and auditory functions as a sound suture between the auditory spectator and the character, Victor in the diegesis constructing both Victor and the auditory spectator as cinesthetic subjects of the visual and the aural. Th e inter-arts patt ern can also be discerned in the uses to which nature is pressed in the fi lm. eTh landscape is no mere cinematographic backdrop, and several shots are exclusively of natural scenes. Th ese have the quality of romantic landscape paintings, but also an aura of desolation, as though their beauty, starkly contrasted to the shack the brothers live in, belongs to others. Th ese shots of the landscape are strangely disconnected from the characters except in the most cursory of contrasts with the Bronx. Yet, the shots of the lotus pond and the lush greenness have narrative weight in that they reveal a diff erent world to the brothers, starting with the misty early morning walk to Miss Malloy’s house. Despite the overall soft focus of this sequence, the aesthetic of the landscape is strangely distant except in the sequences fi lled with action, as when the brothers tumble in the grass to get to the hoop. Th e dance sequence in the green, discussed earlier, when Felipe explodes, illustrates the uneasy relationship between the seemingly un-giving landscape and the brothers. Nevertheless, the inertness of the landscape is animated by the brothers working on it for Miss Malloy, chopping, carrying, cleaning in the dense woods, their abilities gainsaying the indiff erence of the landscape. Th e soundtrack through the approach is slow, intermitt ent, and serves as announcements of their making their way into the property. In these sequences, the
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characters themselves are pictures—still. When the brothers are fi rst greeted by Miss Malloy, they could be a tableau in a set, she a talking full-length picture, both groups brought to size by the landscape. Several other sequences, such as when the brothers work in the grounds, convey the same quality of an estrangement that is marvelous. Th e inter-arts approach that Collins takes has its broadest base in what Teshome Gabriel claims black artists share with nomads, the belief in “collective memory” and the commonality of language: “symbolism, metaphor, music performance” (Gabriel 2001: 402). Th e collective memory in both fi lms is brought in by the symbolism of the ancestral trace (Poppa in Cruz Brothers and vaudun in Losing Ground), by the metaphor of the cinema in both fi lms, the soundtrack with its diegetic overtones in the Cruz Brothers, and fi nally the dances in both fi lms.
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Collins’s work has cleared new ground for the visual in African American culture as seen in the increasingly urgent demands of critics that all artistic practices, especially fi lm, be rooted in the larger African American culture (Gillespie 2016). By including painting and literature as integral components of the visual, Th e Cruz Brothers and Losing Ground succeed in locating black/ minority individuals engaged in the business of discovering the value of art in life. In her screenplays and dramas, Collins identifi es the many existential issues that confront black men and women in their interactions with each other even as they try to fi nd fulfi llment in creative pursuits. Th e emphasis on the interior life impinges on philosophies of identities where blackness jostles with the human exigencies of fi nding a community without yielding the continuing search for a core self. Th ese writings lay out the design for the essai fi lms. “Women, Sisters, and Friends,” a fi lm script writt en in 1971, a decade before Collins was to make her fi lms, belongs to this category, where blackness is not unitary and confi ning but universal and, in that sense, belonging to “world literature.” Th e script features women conversing about intransigent men that they are att racted to, only to fi nd fulfi llment elusive. e Th texts imply, in both major and minor keys, that completeness is to be sought in artistic and intellectual endeavors. Th e theme is patently followed in Losing Ground, and to a lesser extent in Cruz Brothers.
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Th e script of “Women, Sisters, and Friends” has an expres- sionistic and surrealistic tinge to it. Th e visionary impulse of Expressionist poetry and drama is apparent in the allegorical depiction of the man coming in from the sea. Th e script is not tightly plott ed, but roams across the women’s desires, their histories, their presents, their pasts. Th e screenplay already evinces some of the aesthetic patt erns and themes Collins would return to in her plays and fi lms—the contrast between the exterior and interior mise-en-scènes—the exterior animated by movement and action and very oft en dream-like, the interior a place to converse endlessly about life, art, people, sex, self, emotions. All her work has at least one scene or sequence where women talk to each other freely. Th at space she sought to create for women to talk about their lives, as distinct from their being represented, is still rare in fi lm and drama today in its high seriousness and in its complete affi rmation of women’s thinking. Seldom does one see such interchanges centered. Two shift s occur as a consequence of this recurrent trope: both whiteness and masculinity do not function any longer as inevitable reference points; the women’s exchange of ideas serves as the ultimate linguistic code. Organized around three women and their accounts of their life experiences, the script uses off -screen dialogue and commentary to defl ect the visual in a slow subversive but undefi ned mockery of the natural beauty of the sett ing, the beach. Female desire is presented nakedly; one of the women, Marita, wants to wander out on the beach at 3 a.m. hoping for an encounter with an unnamed man who is known to walk around there. Th e man is cast in terms of Oskar Kokoschka’s men in “Murderer, Hope of Women” in the elemental presentation, but is Laurentian in the male surrender to women. Th e female language of desire emerges in this script, to be refi ned in many other scripts and plays, but is fully expressed in surmounting sexual desire while grasping at an essentially indescribable tenderness. Lillie, talking to herself, reminisces about a man who had told her of his fi rst time with a woman: “He was so overcome that he held out his penis to her as an off ering, his face weeping” (Collins 1971). Th e image of his
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“face” weeping instead of him weeping is deft in capturing the immensity of the moment. Collins uses just such images in the concluding scene of Losing Ground when the faces of both Sara and Victor are equally transparent. We see another cinematic variant when Felipe, Victor’s brother, accosts his brothers dancing with Miss Malloy in Cruz Brothers. Replete with elements of the marvelous real, within the specifi c context of the African diaspora, “Women, Sisters, and Friends” introduces a motif that Collins’s fi lms would later develop. In the script, an old woman enters the scene and, with a silent Lillie for an audience, starts recounting the tale of her younger sister’s almost otherworldly coupling with her lover, and then her death. Th e old woman’s appearance in the script is ephemeral and mysterious, and her voice announces her before she is visible. She could well be an ancestral presence that has been summoned. Th e otherworldly is thrown into relief by the reference to the broken bott les that the sister used to make objects of art, puzzling for the old woman. In Gullah culture, bott les and pots that belonged to people who had died were retained to keep their spirits alive, and although the old woman does not appear to know this, she keeps the bott les her sister has left behind. Traces of otherworldliness are manifest in Cruz Brothers in the presence of the ghost in the machine, Poppa, and in Losing Ground in the psychic’s hints, as also in the description of the vaudun rituals. Th e script has other motifs that are central to African/African American culture; for example, a wedding procession with a sermon on marriage and love, except that this one is excerpted from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Lett ers to a Young Poet”; and a folk tale about a young mulatt o girl whom everyone mistrusted, even her lover, so that she walked away to meet the god of the sea, which touches upon an old motif of the slaves walking into the water to resist white oppression. Here, it is the girl who is struggling against “colorism” in the community, and gender stereotypes because of her beauty. Th e script touches on the antagonistic aspects of masculinity as well as the more sympathetic. One of the three women, Marita, returns from her uncle’s funeral—time is completely ignored in the
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script—and defends her uncle’s terrible weakness, no willpower to transcend the “sickness,” the burden of representing the race at all times enforced by class status. A spiritual accompanies the cultural material in the script, further adding to the performative elements that were to be staples of Collins’s movies. Many of the ideas in this script, the atmosphere, the richness of exchange among the women, who discuss whether they have come or not, is not translated in either of her fi lms except by extreme indirection, and very glancingly, even that coming in for criticism for its lack of verisimilitude. Th e screenplays and scripts reveal the repertoire of techniques Collins would later translate into fi lm practice. Sound usage in these writings carries over into the fi lms. Almost all her works, including Cruz Brothers, have several off -screen dialogues that denaturalize both the dialogue and the sett ing. Off -screen sound would appear to have a will of its own, and is more than slightly apart from the visual scene and its cues. Part of such dialogue is to emphasize the language of thought and emotion; to listen to it, instead of having it emoted. In feminist fi lm theory, starting with Arzner criticism, critics have traced the techniques feminist directors use to conceal the private emotions of women, too oft en the sensational allure of mainstream fi lm. In “Women, Sisters, and Friends,” Sylvia, one of the characters, is overheard by us, as she engages in a long phone conversation with a man, George, whom she tries to persuade, with no success, to come and visit her. Th e dialogue alone lets us know that Sylvia is alternately placating, threatening, and feeling helpless and angry at the same time over a quasi-daily undramatic encounter. Th e tail end of the one-sided conversation gives us a fairly full view of Sylvia’s emotions about George, given that the women are in a location that they think off ers them plenitude and grace: “Oh, George, you can’t really not be coming because your library books are due on Monday” (Collins 1971). Telephone conversations, a device to connect the action to a diff erent theatre, occur frequently, functioning as an abstract theatrical substitute for the more conventional cinematic parallel editing.
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Th e screenplay mixes the pictorial, the literary, the per- formative, and the cinematic, combining the mundane, the magical, and the metaphysical in the narrative. Th e metaphysical joins with the literary and performative when one of the other women, Lillie, comes down the misty beach talking to herself, telling of how a man had told her of his fi rst time when he was sixteen. Th ere is an unashamed admiration for the male body, that verges on the discovery of one’s own body through another: “He stood there and as I was watching him I became slowly aware of how completely at ease he was inside his own body, turned towards some private moment all his own” (Collins 1971). Lillie’s memory, narrated, conjures up the pictorial with the weight of her awareness of the sacred erotic, and his sheer wonder about passion. Of equal importance is that this section is a revelation of interiority, of a kind of stream of consciousness that is modernist, but also surreal in bringing in the possibility of the consciousness/ unconscious of three people. Th e screenplay is quite avant-garde, anti-narrative, and describes desire, fantasy, and reality in modes that are not obsessively marked but does show what Irigaray would call “a women’s language,” even where there are clear signs of Kokoschka in the atavistic longing of the women for the man (Irigaray 1985b). Th e screenplay also makes the switch from recording the male unconscious to the female in contrast to Dulac’s Th e Seashell and the Clergyman (1928). Th e fi lms that Collins eventually completed have some of these elements but are more tightly wound in a narrative, more so in Cruz Brothers than in Losing Ground. Another screenplay, “Lila” (1974), is of particular interest to Losing Ground as it is a raw treatment of the ego of the male artist. Featuring an artistic couple—Ben, a drummer, and Marita, a television producer—the screenplay follows the volatile impulses of Ben. Ben creates playful but aggressive scenarios for them to enact; Marita plays along but drops the role to Ben’s disdain. Playacting is psychically threatening for the female here but is radically reshaped in Losing Ground where the female acts to further a deeper psychic connection with herself.
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“Lila” substantively anticipates the exploration of the diff erences between manifestations of male and female creativity examined in Losing Ground. Ben, like Victor, claims artistic license to be unfaithful and is cavalier about his girlfriend Marita’s devotion to him. He meets a woman who is both remarkably naïve and almost unearthly in her physical perfection, Alice. She is mundane in her preoccupations and is mired in an ordinary, diffi cult existence, one that Ben ignores. Th e screenplay is darker about the male artist’s role when Ben begins to use her as a model. He grooms Alice, manipulating her with his greater awareness of the world. Th e Pygmalion motif is stronger here than it is either in Losing Ground or in Th e Cruz Brothers. Ben purposefully changes Alice’s name to Lila, very obviously “remaking” her in his own divine, artistic image. Victor projects similar fantasies on Celia, the Puerto Rican dancer he uses as a model, calling her “Celia Cruz,” but Celia in Losing Ground is quite resistant and opposes Victor’s delusions of artistic grandeur. In “Lila,” Ben drags Alice into acting out scenarios that are supposedly wild, but Alice’s story is wilder. Reality confronts art in a manner that Ben is quite incapable of absorbing. When they are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alice suddenly points to a painting depicting a man with an axe, indexically of her father, who had brought an axe down on her mother’s head. More nonplussing are the details that follow, of how her mother now has to wear her hair as an Afro all the time to cover the long gash. Ben’s subterranean violent tendencies are revealed at the level of language when, straight aft er this scene, he insists on scraping Alice’s hair back, despite her strenuous objections, and pinning it up; a further reshaping of her, less in terms of an ideal, more cynical, deliberately indulging an unspoken violence, covered up by notions of modernist artistic freedoms and the language that accompanies them. Collins strongly objects to the male artistic debasement of modernism’s ideals when it comes to women in extraordinarily strong terms in this screenplay, a theme she follows in Losing Ground. Th e diff erence appears to be that both women, Alice, and Marita, despite her professional
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accomplishments, seem powerless to oppose Ben: Alice because she is out of her depth, and Marita because she loves him. Th e women are linked to each other, and to a stylish female model that surfaces in one of the scenes. Marita fantasizes about being the photographer’s model, dressing up in velvet pants. Another scene makes the link between the photographer’s model, the artist’s model, Alice, and the TV producer would-be photographer’s model, Marita. Ben “dresses up” Alice, who is delighted with the velvet pants, much as a child would be with playing dress-up. Alice invites her friends to come and watch her, unknowingly subverting Ben’s fantasies by rendering them commonplace among her working friends, teachers, hospital employees, service workers, all of whom Ben fi nds irrelevant. Th e connection made between the women here suggests that they are all interchangeable, and in that sense, does not quite rise to doubling, although there are hints of it in Marita’s brief fantasy of being an artist’s model. In Losing Ground, the doubling of women is infi nitely more enriching to the women themselves, as the folding of the double into the self is based on the women’s discovery of an otherness worth inviting. In many of her writings, Collins presents clusters of women’s communities within the larger social network to suggest that these relationships support black women in their eff orts to retain a sense of themselves as independent, creative people. Th e writings are framed by the eff orts of the characters to live in a world where art matt ers and where it is taken seriously as work, and where the female’s authority over her self and her work guides her life. Without fail, Collins’s work takes women’s eroticism seriously and follows the damages wrought to women when their desires remain unarticulated and when, inevitably, they are not fulfi lled. Race is imbricated subtly in this theme where the author/dramatist shows that the relationships between black women and men are deeply damaged by an awareness of blackness as a psychic fl aw. Even as the characters may recognize that the psychic wounds have been internalized because of the social imaginary and they willfully seek to negate them, the women particularly fi nd that the
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men have greater diffi culty understanding how their brokenness aff ects them and their relationships with women. Th e screenplay “A Summer Diary” (n.d.) treats male diffi culties with racial and gender identity. It uses writing, a recurring trope, to foreground the interiority of black subjects (Collins 2019). Th e text describes a modest eff ort at a women’s community when two women, Caroline and Lilianne, with their children decide to live together. Th e editing in the screenplay, as in the bulk of Collins’s work, links the lives of women and invites the audience to make comparisons between them. Collins suggests that in their individual experiences, a universal black feminist theme is apparent: of the impossibility of being black and female; and being black and female and striving to own a creative project is in and of itself devastating. Th e directions in “A Summer Diary” are characteristic of Collins’s style. She uses medium wide shots very oft en to introduce characters, and a stationary camera to capture their conversa- tions. She seldom uses shot/reverse shot, part of her investment in not “manipulating” her characters. Discussions on the shot/ reverse shot technique maintain that the rapid eye movement of the viewer would veer towards one character or the other, and hence shot/reverse shot would imitate the “natural.” Detractors claim that the rapidity of the cutt ing allows access to the emotions of only one character, thus coercing the viewer. From a feminist stylistic framework, shot/reverse shot is theorized as intrusive of the female character; the medium wide shot without cuts allows for a more nuanced understanding of the context. Th e screenplay’s use of female voice overs is also a staple of feminist narratology, primarily to counter a history of authoritative male voice overs. Th e expository function of the voice over is crucial in specifying the narrative course of action and lending credibility to the events. In “A Summer Diary,” Caroline informs us of the death of Lilianne’s husband, Gilles. Although having committ ed suicide the summer before, Gilles appears as a jaunty ghost quite oft en in the house; Caroline’s voice over serves as an introduction of a member of the cast in a play. Th e ghost motif recurs in Th e Cruz Brothers and
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Miss Malloy, another instance of the African diaspora ancestral motif that would be drawn out in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). Th e idea of haunting hints at lingering debts the living owe the dead; while off ering tokens for ancestors are ritualized in African culture, in Collins’s work the ghosts seem to be bearing witness to the living, and urging them to deserve the lives they have, wages for the struggles of the dead. Much of the dialogue in the screenplays dwells on artistic projects and aspirations. Collins brings in arts as diverse as weaving and sculpting, photography and playwriting, set-design and instrumental music into her scripts almost as though to cover the spectrum of possibilities for black artists and craft workers. Put together, her works compose a group portrait of the black artist with the black female artist at the center. Th e world of art that she depicts, although replete with creative exuberance, is quite oft en dark and chaotic, particularly for women artists. “A Summer Diary” reveals a more violent aspect associated with the arrogance of the male artist, a casual callousness exceeding indiff erence. Caroline tells Lilianne of her husband Rafael’s photographic model, who pulls a knife on Caroline; Rafael dismisses the episode as the belly dancer’s temperament, almost blaming Caroline for not having the same frenzied temperament. Each of Collins’s works is marked by a meta-refl ective episode of considerable length. While these are elaborated in multiple modalities in her two fi lms, her screenplays also have this component, whereby the characters in the diegesis and in the audience are treated to an entertainment set. “A Summer Diary” features singing, a frequent occurrence in much of her work, and a fairly fl eshed-out musical drama, complete with the director giving the chorus instructions on character and acting profi les. Th e screenplays themselves are constructed episodically, sett ing almost no stock on the action but throwing the weight on the emotional unrolling of the female characters. Flashbacks in both “A Summer Diary” and “Women, Sisters, and Friends” fi ll in the gaps to contextualize the women’s emotional stances. Th e work of art within the artefact is proof of its production,
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carrying the traces of the work instrumental in assembling it. To a large extent, the work of art then is demystifi ed, and exposed for its relentless demands of energy and work. Th e characters are oft en shown doing batt le with the everyday problems of an artist on the rise. Th e social circle can be equally chilly. When Caroline in “A Summer Diary” tells her father of a script on a woman and her att empts to understand her feelings on love, she is almost shamefaced, anticipating his skepticism. Aft er all, he has designated her profession, set-designing, amorphous and lacking character. Yet, the play within the screenplay, or the fi lm within the fi lm, or the dance within the fi lm are triumphant in the moment of achievement, and inspiring to the implied audience in the texts. “Almost Music: A Cabaret Play” (1980) with music by Michael Minard, who would score the music for Cruz Brothers, refl ects on song, its allure and its falseness. Th e perils and pleasures of romance recall the fl eeting sentiments of pathos, the provenance of the “Negro” music off ering another note of melancholy not rendered. Th e cabaret artists, characters longing to experience life in a sharper way, quite purely seek love. Th e female characters are girl-women, quite unlike the characters in Collins’s plays and fi lms. A chorus of women drinkers serve as fi lters to the action of the play, an implied audience who have traversed this path and raucously support the female singer in her need to sing of love, a theme that the piano player adamantly opposes. Sex is okay, so is politics; war is acceptable; but love, that is the kiss of death, no one will feel good with songs of love and its bleeding messes. Th e interruptions from the piano player, the screaming of the chorus of women even as the female singer vaguely reminisces with a man, identifi ed only as such, shift spectating positions dramatically as women viewers throw their lot in with the chorus of women, and then are compelled to a more social stance by the forms of music, rather than the underlying emotions. Th e strategy is post-expressionist in showing both the veneer and the raw primal emotion beneath. Th e singer and the chorus of women are not naïve romantics; rather, they are
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ironic, and pained about their longings and about the refusal of conventional art to give voice to these. Th e singer confi des in the women about male anger, incomprehensible to her aft er an evening of pleasure; a stinging rejection as the man takes off to any which place in the dead of the night. And this happens, not once, but three diff erent times, leaving the singer semi-catatonic in pain. Th e language of music here once again recalls feminist eff orts to speak a diff erent language, one that is not stuck in Aristotelian dicta. Th e songs become darker through the cabaret, moving from longing to desperation; the music and art become ways of holding the self together. For women, to aspire to love and to be modern is shown to be a contradiction in terms. And yet, whether in an anguished or semi-droll register, the singer is not willing to give it up. Proper names are not ascribed to any of the characters, augmenting the expressionist impulse, given to allegory and referring to the universal. Th e play closes cursorily, open-ended, and comes back callously to the conventions of the genre, revealing cynically the shabby cover-up of art in throwing it all back at the audience. “In the Midnight Hour,” a play writt en in 1978 and published in 1980, is about the dangers of upper-class blacks burying all consciousness of race to att empt to live life freely without race expectations dogging them. Th e play could easily be mistakenly regarded as a Woody Allen rough script featuring characters shooting the breeze, gently mocking each other while musing about themselves. Th e conversation skirts around the edges, fear of exteriors and facades holding sway. Unlike Genet’s “Th e Blacks” (1959) that reveals characters playing a conscious double game with both themselves and white society, or Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1962) that tears the strips off any exterior modeling of the psyche, the characters in this play crumble, trying to avoid any conscious acknowledgment of race and its impact on their identities. Th e dramatist subtly locates them in black culture; she mixes media eff ortlessly in her work—in this case, music. Th e characters spend an evening on the Westside of New York listening to three versions of “Take the A Train,” the
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train to Harlem and the black community, by Duke Ellington, Anita O’Day, and Carmen McCrae. Ornett e Coleman is also played while the deliberateness of the New York cosmopolitan life, ultimately at odds with the universalist, is emphasized. Christine, one of the visitors to the middle-class Abernathy apartment, is a Barnard girl brought home by the seemingly radiant young adult children of the family. All three youngsters are on the verge of joining a “reform,” a political action movement. Th e superhuman eff ort is to persuade the next generation that being black in the US is not destructive. Ralph, the father, mock-proudly states that there were “No negro reasons ruining [his] life” (Collins [1980] 2002: 31), a low-key refrain punctuating the daughter’s search for ecstasy, a motif through Collins’s work. Th e bohemian friends, a piano player and a rejected would-be priest, also seek ecstasy. Th e piano player’s route is through an insatiable haptic att achment to the keys of the piano; the failed priest’s through what he labels “Religion and the Ecstatic Experience.” Th e playwright pokes a hole in this fragile cosmopolitan caul in the bloodiest manner: the son kills himself, the father spends years chronically depressed, the mother, like many of Collins’s women, is described as “drift ing.” Th e question posed by the play when the son, Ben, exclaims that he did not know who he was until he was fi een,ft is whether a cosmopolitan veneer over a deeper universalist drive is possible without being sedimented in history. Th e issue of who one is at the cosmopolitan “party” niveau is quirky, entertaining, and self-indulgent but explodes when that who, translated as a raced interpellation, blocks all access to subjectivity. Th e very thin individuality of these characters forecloses any entrance to subjectivity. Th e father’s male identity as the patriarch is demolished when these events occur and he is left with the horrifying realization of what he has done to his son. He off ers his son a bare-boned apology, “Didn’t tell him [the son] what was going on outside” (Collins [1980] 2002: 27). Outside and inside serve as key determinants of identity in “Th e Brothers,” which unblinkingly scrutinizes the destructive consequences to composing male and female identities when
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the outside deforms an imperceptible folded self that is barely noticeable but whose existence is felt. Set in 1948 but writt en during the post-civil rights era (1981), the play is about masculinity and, more specifi cally, about a ravaged masculinity killing women. Historical occurrences are mentioned, particularly the markers of Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in 1968, that suggest a Lukácsian “critical realist” orientation showing characters embedded in the historical and acting as agents in history. Collins has reversed this classic mode of locating class to show how very consciously the African American upper/ upper middle class att empts to remove itself from the historical. One strategy that is used revolves around the eff ort to be part of the “fi rsts” among coloreds, another devolves to creating a refi ned, rarefi ed ambiance, but both are compelled by a Kristevan impulse to expel the abject, or at least to wage war on it. Th e abject is the sensory, the physical, the tangible of blackness. Collins’s screenplays and her fi lms diverge quite sharply from any mainstream depictions of African American female sexuality, off ering her black female audience and the larger public a world that popular culture does not believe exists. Th e representation of black sexuality whether male or female is never rendered with the richness of the intimate gaze, with the fullness of a human desire for closeness and pleasure that is revealed in Losing Ground, in the protagonist’s understanding of her desires and her sexual relationship with her husband. Collins implies that to get to any depth, culturally toxic layers have to be shed, but that a notional racial identity lingers, disallowing any authentic acceptance of the sexual self. Th e denial of corporeality, the expulsion of physicality, would seem to be necessary to be “civilized,” for which sexuality would need to be obviated. Th e problem then lies not just in the movies, but also in the cultural reifi cation of black sexuality. A short story entitled “Stepping Back” delicately shows the war against sexuality. Th e woman in the story mocks herself for not being sexually eager: “As if all forms of cultural underdevelopment had somehow passed [her] by” (Collins 2016: 87). As the colored woman and man
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revel in each other’s avoidance of the overtly sexual, the female protagonist is compelled in strongly essentialist terms by the demands of her physical body:
My breasts stung and I longed to feel his fi ngers pull at them. Instead I caught myself stepping back . . . retreating . . . In the face of our delicacy, our . . . how could I occupy the splendid four-poster bed? Tastefully enough. How could I pass beneath the candelabras and undress? Tastefully enough? No colored woman could. No colored woman could. (Collins 2016: 91)
Note the hesitation in the repetition of “tastefully enough,” this time emphasized by the question mark at the end followed by the resolute repetition that “No colored woman could.” Th e phrase repeated three times suggests that the protagonist’s femininity is held hostage by the inhibitions of a notional race that obviates her sexuality and makes it other than “tasteful” or “civilized.” Mainstream fi lm magnifi es this cultural imaginary of the hyper-sexualized black subject by parlaying black sexuality through the white heteronormative male gaze in the case of the black man. Th e black woman’s sexuality is brokered through both the white man and the black man. Th is phenomenon in mainstream fi lm has its roots in the Hays Code and the archetypal patt erns established by Griffi th’s Birth of a Nation. Th rough her analysis of Lethal Weapon (dir. Donner, 1987), Colors (dir. Hopper, 1988), and Angel Heart (dir. Parker, 1987), Jacquie Jones maintains that Hollywood refuses to give black men a love interest for fear of humanizing them. Th is “denormalizing” is the consequence of a continuous treatment of black men as “overly developed and animal forms” (Jones 1993: 249). Using psycho- analytic theory, Jones argues that black female sexuality becomes an element to be dominated by black men assuming the role of white men with black women. In discussing the relay of looks in a fi lm such asMahogany (dir. Gordy, 1975), Jane Gaines (1990) establishes a clear hierarchy whereby the black woman is subject to the gaze of the white man, white woman, black man. Th e black
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woman cannot return the look. Collins upends this hierarchy in Losing Ground by bypassing the relevance and power of the look and granting the female authority through control of her intellect and her sexuality. While black masculinity was explored in a multi-faceted way by black male directors in the 1980s in the New Realism fi lms, the rep- resentation of black women continued to remain “denormalized.” Using two of the most popular of these fi lms, Singleton’sBoyz N the Hood (1991) and Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), Michele Wallace roundly charges the fi lms with “demoniz[ing] black family sexuality as a threat to black male heterosexual identity” (Wallace 1993a: 130). Th e fi lms’ critique of single mothers is in line with the infamous Moynihan Report (1965) that blamed Black America’s wage and achievement gap on households headed by women. Wallace’s own conclusion is that there were some “alarming trend[s]” noticeable in these fi lms,primary among them that “Black women fi lmmakers, not to mention black feminist fi lm criticism were becoming unimaginable” (Wallace 1993a: 122). It is in this context that Collins wrote the scripts for her fi lms, found fi nancing, and shot both Cruz Brothers and Losing Ground, featuring themes and ideas about black women and colored men that were refl ective, alternative, and off ered ways of thinking of diff erence outside of the black male framework, one that eff ectively ejected black women from an imagined national imaginary.1 White nationalism has lent the term national imaginary itself sinister resonances, but it is relevant at the representational level to Collins’s eff orts to uncover and tell the stories of people without submerging them in categories that essentially set them apart from the nation as an imagined community. Her rearticulation of masculinity to introduce “bois” that “signifi es another form of masculinity” (Harris 2006: 1) with some apprehension of the universal enabled men to be participants in the social, revealing what Collins might call their “symbolic” motivation, as distinct from their “real,” that pits them against the social fabric (Collins 1984a). Collins’s achievement in “normalizing” black sexuality cannot be overstated. As late as 2009, black feminist critics continued
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to write about the reifi cation of black male and female sexuality on screen. Th e hyper-violence and hyper-sexualization of black masculinity in mainstream fi lm persists (Mask 2009). It is instructive to consider whether the treatment of black women in the history of independent black cinema is substantially diff erent. Independent black cinema has its beginnings in race fi lms. Race fi lms originated in the early part of the twentieth century because of massive African American migration to the urban north. Th e black bourgeoisie, which was quite substantial in cities such as Philadelphia, sought to educate the black migrants, who were not held together by the precepts of the church or by the dominant infl uence of local newspapers. Race fi lms fulfi lled a very important function in that they addressed a black audience, thus providing entertainment for blacks, rather than about them. Many of the vaudeville fi lms did not necessarily engage in the “uplift ” that the black middle class might have aspired to, and featured mixed-genre fi lms that att empted to please diff erent groups of people. Th e Scar of Shame (1927) is a preeminent example of the silent era melodramas that were essentially sociological in approach and used some of the staple fi gures of African American literature such as the tragic mulatt o (Cripps 2003). Th e fi lm features violent and exploitative men of the working classes and unappreciative, class-bound men of the upper classes. Th us, while some standard archetypes of black women were “animalistic,” black independent fi lms created black female heroes, modeled on white female heroes, who alone represented “true womanhood” (Carby 1987). Many of these race fi lms, including the vast Micheaux corpus, show virtuous women att empting to be useful members of the community, the church, and the nation. Collins’s references to Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl McCormack indicate her admiration for these actors, particularly Dorothy Dandridge, who played the “tragic mulatt o” more than once. Carmen Jones (dir. Preminger, 1954), starring Dorothy Dandridge, functions as a cultural trace in Losing Ground and shows the female seeker as doomed. In African American literature, the image of a desiring woman emerges in the Harlem
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Renaissance of the 1920s and in the novels of Nella Larsen, aft er a long stint of women characters in literature bound to the strictures of the “cult of true womanhood.” It is plausible that Helga Crane in Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928) is allowed to explore her sexuality because of the context of fi lm culture, including African American fi lms that were rewriting the tragic mulatt o/a archetype. For instance, Oscar Micheaux, in his fi lms, used visual stratagem to express female desire obliquely through dreams, fl ashbacks, and embedded stories. Like Micheaux, Collins uses the extra-diegetic to present women’s desires, if much more forcefully and directly. Collins was making her fi lms aft er a slew of Hollywood fi lms that featured hyper-sexualized black males and females, to the exclusion of black desiring subjectivities, whether male or female. Hollywood studios had capitalized on Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), a black urban independent fi lm that eff ectively ended the era of the “vanilla” comedies starring Sidney Poitier (Guerrero 2002). Critics are divided about the contribution of Blaxploitation fi lms; however, many, including Samuel Jackson and Quentin Tarantino, felt that these fi lms, particularlyShaft (dir. Parks, 1971), allowed the black man to stride through the streets of New York as though he owned it, enhanced by the cinematography, particularly the diagonals in Shaft as Richard Roundtree crosses the street in the iconic opening sequence. Th e comment of an older black woman reminiscing about Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is telling in that she remembers that she and the audience were stunned and thrilled that the black character had not died, that he had actually survived at the resolution of the fi lm (Guerrero 2002). However, while black masculinity may have been a particularly vibrant response to the Uncle Tom archetype of the Poitier fi lms, the black buck and the Jezebel trope are repackaged affi rmatively, particularly the gun-toting mama. Collins held no truck with these movies; her own reading of the power of sexuality is in a diff erent register, more in tune with the deep human needs of her male and female characters.
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Among her contemporaries, Collins appreciated Charles Burnett ’s Killer of Sheep (1977), its aesthetic, and its approach to interiority, but had reservations about his portrayal of women. Indeed, the fi lm is avant-garde; but its great achievement, expressing the rich interior life of the black man, leaves no room for the black woman, who is pushed further and further away towards the edges of his existence. Suffi ce it to say that the kind of full portrayal we have of Sara in Losing Ground is the fi rst of its kind in the post-civil rights era, and probably in the history of African American fi lm.
Note
1 Th e cinematographer of the two fi lms, Ronald Gray, recounts diffi culties of fi nding fi nancing and of completing both fi lms in the special features section of Losing Ground.
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In the context of African American fi lm studies, where accurate or “authentic” representations have been an ideal, and realism normative, Kathleen Collins shift ed to off ering perspectives of black/minority life outside of obvious realistic parameters. Th e “otherworldly” or mystical illusions provides a clearing ground for universal dialogue, connecting the interior to the exterior. In this vision of the dialogic, she interjects the philosophical to preempt any dogmatic principles from governing human action and thought. Th e introduction of race into philosophic inquiry about being, the self, and the other is an att empt to underscore the processes of thinking. From the opening sequence of Losing Ground we see this investment in understanding the history of ideas, particularly the notion that raced subjects have been cast outside the normal, as extraordinarily lacking in virtue. Above all else, the fi lm reveals both protagonists, not as projections of the white imaginary, but as human beings struggling with these issues while pursuing philosophy, art, and virtue. Collins was not entirely alone in this search for a new language for African American fi lm. Part of the New York Black Independents, she, like Gunn, used literature as a trope in the fi lm, and translated its facility with metaphor and metonymy in her fi lms, particularly in the useof her mise-en-scènes. Take, for instance, the landscape in Cruz Brothers, implacable, but in and of itself off ering a glimpse into another world.
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Th e possibility of that other world impinging on this one characterizes both Cruz Brothers and Losing Ground. Th e fi lms are distinctive in off ering what can only be called secular grace. No one is called to a strict accounting, none of the characters is manipulated to arrange a neat ending; we know how ideas have helped them “evolve in the center of their being” (Collins 1984a). As ideas are shared, and animate all the characters, the world views of the fi lm are consequently complete and communal, rather than individualistic. Collins’s strategy in both fi lms is to register the authority of a range of characters in the diegesis. Th e fi lms are modernist, countervailed by the mythical and the marvelous real in Cruz Brothers and amplifi ed by the metafi lmic in Losing Ground. Color, sound, and cinematography distinguish between the magical real and the marvelous real in Cruz Brothers, the aesthetics revealing the director’s politics. Th e repercussions for the larger community are apparent in the techniques of doubling that Losing Ground purveys, paying homage to black women in the African American tradition, and respecting the use value of ancestral knowledge for the contemporary black woman. Emphasizing the artistry of the black/minority subject, the fi lms take an integrated approach to the literary and performing arts, including dance, drama, set-design, literature, painting, and fi lm. The aesthetic of the fi lms is derived from this inter-arts approach. Collins’s visionary idea of locating the fi lmic in the larger cultural tradition emerges from her work as a writer of fi ction, drama, and screenplays. Th is corpus establishes black women as artists, and black communities as integral to the creation of art. Countering the persistence of the racial imaginary in representations of black subjects, Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and Losing Ground present worlds where black feminist culture is a reality.
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 151151 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Bibliography
Alexander, Elizabeth (2004), Th e Black Interior, Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. Althusser, Louis (1971), “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Monthly Press. Badley, Linda, Claire Perkins, and Michele Schreiber (eds.) (2016), Indie Refr amed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baker Jr., Houston A. (1993), “Spike Lee and the Commerce of Culture,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara, New York: Routledge, an AFI Paperback. Barthes, Roland (1994), S/Z, Oeuvres Complètes: Tome II 1966–73, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Bazin, André (1967), What is Cinema?, Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett , Michael, and Vanessa Dickerson (eds.) (2001), Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by Afr ican American Women, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Benston, Kimberly (2000), Performing Blackness: Enactments of Afr ican American Modernism, New York: Routledge. Beverly, Michele P. (2012), “Phenomenal Bodies: Th e Metaphysical Possibilities of Post-Black Film and Visual Culture,” Dissertation, Georgia State University,
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 152152 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Bibliography 153
Bogle, Donald (1973), Toms, Coons, Mulatt oes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film, New York: Bantam Books. Bordwell, David (1996), “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision,” in Post-Th eory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bowser, Pearl, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (eds.) (2001), Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: Afr ican American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brody, Richard (2019), “Kathleen Collins’s Notes fr om a Black Woman’s Diary Contains an Extraordinary Unmade Movie,” Th e New Yorker, February 2,
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 153153 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM 154 Kathleen Collins
— [1980] (2015), “Commentary Track: Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy,” in Losing Ground, DVD, Harrington Park, NJ: Milestone Films. — [1982] (2015), Losing Ground, DVD, Harrington Park, NJ: Milestone Films. — (2016), Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories, New York: Ecco. — [1985] (2018), Only the Sky is Free, Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press. — (2019), Notes fr om a Black Woman’s Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins, ed. Nina Lorez Collins, New York: HarperCollins. Crary, Jonathan (1999), Suspension of Perception: Att ention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cripps, Th omas (1993), “Oscar Micheaux: Th e Story Continues,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara, New York: Routledge, an AFI Paperback. — (2003), “‘Race Movies’ as Voices of the Black Bourgeoisie: Th e Scar of Shame,” in Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, ed. Valerie Smith, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Danow, David K. (1995), Th e Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Davis, Zeinabu Irene (2014), “Keeping the Black in Media Production: One L.A. Rebellion Filmmaker’s Notes,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 53, No. 4: 157–61. Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Diawara, Manthia (1993), “Black American Cinema: Th e New Realism,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara, New York: Routledge, an AFI Paperback. Diawara, Manthia, and Phyllis Klotman (1990), Ganja and Hess: Vampires, Sex, and Addictions,” Jump Cut, No. 35: 30–6. Donalson, Melvin (2003), Black Directors in Hollywood, Austin: University of Texas Press. Doy, Gen (2000), Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity, New York: I. B. Tauris. Du Cille, Ann (1994), “Th e Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 19, No. 31: 591–629. Eisenstein, Sergei (1949), Film Form: Essays in Film Th eory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda, New York: Harcourt, Brace. Fabe, Marilyn (2018), Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fischer, Lucy (2013), Body Double: Th e Author Incarnate in the Cinema, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 154154 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Bibliography 155
Flinn, Caryl (1992), Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Flory, Dan (2006), “Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist,” “Th inking Th rough Cinema: Film as Philosophy,” Special Issue of Th e Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 64, No. 1: 67–79. Forster, Nicholas (2015), “Unsett ling the Archive: Tell It Like It Is and the Constitutive Possibilities of Black Film History,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1: 64–71. Francis, Terri (2007), “Cinema on the Lower Frequencies: Black Independent Filmmaking,” Black Camera, Vol. 22, No. 1: 19–21. Franklin, Oliver (1980), “Kathleen Collins in Conversation with Oliver Franklin,”
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 155155 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM 156 Kathleen Collins
Harris, Keith (2006), Boys, Boyz, Bois: An Ethics of Black Masculinity in Film and Popular Media, New York: Routledge. — (2016), “Close-up: Black Film and Black Visual Culture,” Black Camera, Vol. 8, No. 1: 124–7. Holland, Norman N. (n.d.), “Éric Rohmer, Ma nuit chez Maud/My Night at Maud’s (1969),” A Sharper Focus: Essays on Film by Norman Holland,
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 156156 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Bibliography 157
Kristeva, Julia [1969] (1982), Desire in Language, ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Tom Gora and Alice Jardine, New York: Columbia University Press. Kurnick, David (2011), Empty Houses: Th eatrical Failure and the Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lopez, Ana M. (1991), “Are All Latins from Manhatt an?: Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Colonialism,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed. Lester Friedman, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. McCabe, Janet (2004), Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema, London: Wallfl ower Press. Majumdar, Saikat (2015), Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire, New York: Columbia University Press. Manatu, Norma (2003), Afr ican American Women and Sexuality in the Cinema, Jeff erson, NC: McFarland. Marriot, David (2007), Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Mars, Louis [1946] (1977), Th e Crisis of Possession in Voodoo, Port-au-Prince: Reed, Cannon & Johnson. Masilela, Ntongela (1993), “Th e Los Angeles School of Filmmakers,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara, New York: Routledge, an AFI Paperback. Mask, Mia (ed.) (2009), Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mast, Gerald, and Bruce F. Kawin (2011), A Short History of the Movies, 11th ed., Boston: Longman. Matt hews, Nadine (2017), “Visionary Filmmaker Kathleen Collins Featured at Upcoming BAM Series,” New York Amsterdam News, March 22. Mbembe, Achille (2017), Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mellier, Denis (2018), “Pléthora de doubles: saturation, épuisement, persistence à propos du cinema du double contemporain,” in Le double: litt érature, arts, cinéma, Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur. Mercer, Kobena (1994), Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. Mims, Sergio Alejandro (1990), “A New Life: Independent Black Filmmaking during the 1980s,” Black Camera, Vol. 5, No. 1: 3–4. Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1991), When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation Gender and Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge. Nasta, Dominique (1991), Meaning in Film: Relevant Structures in Soundtrack and Narrative, Berne: Peter Lang. Neal, Larry (1968), “Th e Black Arts Movement,” Th e Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 12, No. 4: 28–39.
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 157157 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM 158 Kathleen Collins
Nicholson, David (1988/9), “A Commitment to Writing: A Conversation with Kathleen Collins Prett yman,” Black Film Review, Vol. 5, No. 1: 6–15. Okiti, Tega (2016), “Ecstatic Truths,” Sight and Sound, Vol. 26, No. 6: 36–8. O’Malley, Hayley (2019), “Art on Her Mind: Th e Making of Kathleen Collins’s Cinema of Interiority,” Black Camera, Vol. 10, No. 2: 80–103. Parkerson, Michelle (1988/9), “Remembering Kathleen Conwell Collins Prett yman,” Black Film Review, Vol. 5, No. 1: 5. Petrowski, Nathalie (1981), “Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy,” Kinemathek, Vol. 58 (March). Peucker, Brigitt e (1995), Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Phillips, Caryl (2005), Dancing in the Dark, New York: Vintage Books. Ramanathan, Geetha (2006), Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films, London: Wallfl ower Press. See in particular ch. 5, pp. 141–68. — (2015), “Sound and Feminist Modernity in Black Women’s Film Narratives,” in Feminisms, eds. Laura Mulvey and Anna Beckman Rogers, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ramanathan, Geetha, and Stacey Schlau (1995), “Th ird World Women’s Texts and the Politics of Feminist Criticism,” “Th ird World Women’s Inscriptions,” eds. Geetha Ramanathan and Stacey Schlau, Special Issue of College Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1: 1–9. Reed, Ishmael [1980] (2018), Jacket Notes to Bill Gunn: Personal Problems, New York: Kino Lorber. Reid, Mark A. (1993), Redefi ning Black Film, Berkeley: University of California Press. — (1997), Postnegritude Visual and Literary Culture, Albany: State University of New York Press. — (2005), Black Lenses, Black Voices: Afr ican American Film Now, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Litt lefi eld. Rhinehart, Zoë (2016), “Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground,” Music and Literature, April 14,
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 158158 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Bibliography 159
Schjeldahl, Peter (2001), “Picasso’s Lust,” Th e New Yorker, July 1,
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Wiegand, Daniel (2015), “‘Performed Live and Talking: No Kinematograph’: Amateur Performances of Tableaux Vivants and Local Film Exhibitions in Germany around 1910,” in Performing New Media, 1890–1915, eds. Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, New Barnet: John Libbey. Willemen, Paul (1994), “Th e Th ird Cinema Question: Notes and Refl ections,” in Questions of Th ird Cinema, eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, London: British Film Institute. Williams, John (1994), “Re-creating Th eir Media Image: Two Generations of Black Women Filmmakers,” Cineaste, Vol. 20, No. 3: 38–41. Witt ig, Monique (1976), Th e Lesbian Body, trans. David Le Vay, New York: Avon, a Bard book. Woll, Alan (1981), “How Hollywood Has Portrayed Hispanics,” New York Times, March 1. Woloch, Alex (2003), Th e One vs. Th e Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yancy, George (1998), Afr ican American Philosophers: 17 Conversations, New York: Routledge. Yancy, George (ed.) (2004), What White Looks Like: Afr ican-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, New York: Routledge.
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 160160 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Filmography
Th e Abyss, directed by Urban Gad. Denmark: Kosmorama, 1910. Th e Other, directed by Max Mack. Germany: Vitascope, 1913. Th e Student of Prague, directed by Stellan Rye. Germany: Deutsche Biscop, 1913. Th e Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffi th. USA: Epoch, 1915. Broken Blossoms, directed by D. W. Griffi th. USA: United Artists, 1919. Within Our Gates, directed by Oscar Micheaux. USA: Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1919. Th e Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene. Germany: Decla– Bioscop, 1920. Th e Smiling Madame Beudet, directed by Germaine Dulac. France: Film d’Art/ Vandal/Dulac-Aubert, 1923. Ballet Mécanique, directed by Fernand Léger. France: Fernand Léger/Dudley Murphy, 1924. Body and Soul, directed by Oscar Micheaux. USA: Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1925. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, directed by Walter Rutt mann. Germany: Fox Europa, 1927. Th e Scar of Shame, directed by Frank Peregini (as Frank Perugini). USA: Philadelphia Colored Players Film Corporation, 1927. Sunrise, directed by F. W. Murnau. USA: Fox, 1927. Th e Seashell and the Clergyman, directed by Germaine Dulac. France: Germaine Dulac, 1928. Th e Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Germany: UFA, 1930. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. USA: Paramount Pictures, 1931. Christopher Strong, directed by Dorothy Arzner. USA: RKO, 1933. Imitation of Life, directed by John M. Stahl. USA: Universal, 1934. Th e Blood of Jesus, directed by Spencer Williams. USA, Amegro Films, 1941. Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles. USA: RKO, 1941.
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 161161 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM 162 Kathleen Collins
Bright Road, directed by Gerald Mayer. USA: MGM, 1953. Carmen Jones, directed by Ott o Preminger. USA: Ott o Preminger, 1954. Touch of Evil, directed by Orson Welles. USA: Universal International, 1958. Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. France: SNC, 1960. Jules and Jim, directed by François Truff aut. France: Films du Carosse/Sedif, 1962. May Be the Last Time, directed by Larry Neal, 1969. Item number 14636, James E. Hinton Collection, Harvard Film Archive, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University. My Night with Maud, directed by Éric Rohmer. France: Pierre Cott rell and Barbet Schroeder, 1969. One Last Look, directed by Charles Hobson. USA: [no producer listed], 1969. Th e Pirate’s Fiancée, directed by Nelly Kaplan. France: Cythère Films, 1969. Cott on Comes to Harlem, directed by Ossie Davis. USA: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., 1970. Stock Exchange Transplant, directed by Douglas Collins. USA: [no producer listed], 1970. Touching Ground, directed by Douglas Collins. USA: [no producer listed], 1970. Shaft , directed by Gordon Parks. USA: MGM, 1971. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, directed by Melvin Van Peebles. USA: Jerry Gross and Melvin Van Peebles, 1971. Ganja and Hess, directed by Bill Gunn. USA: Bill Schulz, 1973. Bush Mama, directed by Haile Gerima. USA: Haile Gerima, 1974. Mahogany, directed by Berry Gordy. USA: Motown Productions, 1975. Killer of Sheep, directed by Charles Burnett . USA: Charles Burnett , 1977. A Place in Time, directed by Charles Lane. USA: Charles Lane, 1977. Th e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, directed by Kathleen Collins. USA: CGR Productions, Eleanor Charles, and various non-profi t agencies, 1980. I Remember Harlem, directed by William Miles. USA: [no producer listed], 1981. Will, directed by Jessie Maple. USA: [no producer listed], 1981. Losing Ground, directed by Kathleen Collins. USA: Kathleen Collins and Ronald K. Gray, 1982. A Question of Silence, directed by Marleen Gorris. Netherlands: Quartet Films, 1982. Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, directed by Spike Lee. USA: Spike Lee and Zimmie Shelton, 1983. Hour of the Star, directed by Suzana Amaral. Brazil: Assunção Hernandez, 1985. Th e Purple Rose of Cairo, directed by Woody Allen. USA: Robert Greenhut et al., 1985.
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 162162 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Filmography 163
Vagabond, directed by Agnès Varda. USA: Ciné-Tamaris, 1985. She’s Gott a Have It, directed by Spike Lee. USA: Island Pictures, 1986. Angel Heart, directed by Alan Parker. USA: Alan Marshall and Elliot Kastner, 1987. Lethal Weapon, directed by Richard Donner. USA: Richard Donner and Joel Silver, 1987. Colors, directed by Dennis Hopper. USA: Robert H. Soto, 1988. Do the Right Th ing, directed by Spike Lee. USA: A Forty Acres and a Mule Production, 1989. Looking for Langston, directed by Isaac Julien. UK: Sankofa Film and Video, 1989. Sidewalk Stories, directed by Charles Lane. USA: Charles Lane, 1989. Boyz N the Hood, directed by John Singleton. USA: Steve Nicolaides, 1991. Daughters of the Dust, directed by Julie Dash. USA: A Geechee Girls Production, 1991. Jungle Fever, directed by Spike Lee. USA: A Forty Acres and a Mule Production, 1991. New Jack City, directed by Mario Van Peebles. USA: Doug McHenry and George Jackson, 1991. Straight Out of Brooklyn, directed by Matt y Rich. USA: Matt y Rich, 1991. Deep Cover, directed by Bill Duke. USA: Pierre David and Henry Bean, 1992. Juice, directed by Ernest R. Dickerson. USA: David Heyman and Neal H. Moritz, 1992. L’Amant, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. France: A Renn Production, 1992. White Men Can’t Jump, directed by Ron Shelton. USA: David Lester, Don Miller, and Michele Rappaport, 1992. Bhaji on the Beach, directed by Gurinder Chadha. UK: Nadine Marsh-Edwards, 1993. Made in America, directed by Richard Benjamin. USA: Studio Canal and Regency Enterprises, 1993. Watermelon Woman, directed by Cheryl Dunye. USA: Barry Swimar and Alexandra Juhasz, 1996. Artemisia, directed by Agnès Merlet. France/Germany/Italy: Christoph Meyer-Weil and Leo Pescaralo, 1998. Shaft , directed by John Singleton. USA: Scott Rudin and John Singleton, 2000. Frida, directed by Julie Taymor. USA: Sarah Green, 2002. BlacKkKlansman, directed by Spike Lee. USA: A Forty Acres and a Mule Production, 2018. Shaft , directed by Tim Story. USA: Kenya Baris, Tim Story et al., 2019.
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 163163 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Index
Th e Abyss, 49 Black Arts, 41 African American folklore, black femininity, 12 folktale, 33, 47, 77, 108 black masculinity, 12, 114, African American 145–8 melodrama, 85 Th e Blacks, 42, 142 Albee, Edward, 142 Blaxploitation, 52 Alexander, Elizabeth, 114 Th e Blue Angel, 78 Allen, Woody, 118, 142 Body and Soul, 105 “Almost Music: A Cabaret Boyz N the Hood, 146 Play,” 141–2 Breathless, 68, 102, 105 Althusser, Louis, 66 Breton, André, 117 Amaral, Suzana, 24 “Th e Brothers,” 143 Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 24 Brown vs. Board of Education, 6 Arzner, Dorothy, 52, 59, 135 Burnett , Charles, 8, 18–19, Asante, Amma, 53 149 Astruc, Alexandre, 53 Bush Mama, 18, 19 auteurship, 11, 51–6 Camus, Albert, 68, 118–19 Baldwin, James, 29 capital, capitalism, 89–90 Barthes, Roland, Barthesian, Carmen Jones, 47, 80 107 Carpentier, Alejo, 57 Bazin, André, 120, 124 Carter, Steve, 28 Bhaji on the Beach, 77 Cassel, Valerie, 115 Birth of a Nation, 145 Chadha, Gurinder, 17, 53, 77 black aesthetic, 40–1 Christopher Strong, 59
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 164164 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Index 165
Cinema of Hunger, 34 Gabriel, Teshome, 19, 91, 131 Cinema Novo, 34 Gaines, Jane, 85, 145 Citizen Kane, 90 Gandhi, M. K., 144 Coleman, Ornett e, 143 Ganja and Hess, 16, 17, 20–1, cosmopolitanism, cosmopoli- 22, 57 tan, 11, 36–7, 38–40, Genet, Jean, 33, 42, 66, 70, 75, 143 119, 142 counter-cinema, 52 Gerima, Haile, 18 Th e Cruz Chronicle, 55–6, 58 Godard, Jean Luc, 68, 102, 105 Dancing in the Dark, 77 Gorris, Marleen, 114 Dandridge, Dorothy, 47, Gramsci, Antonio 60, 66 79–80, 122, 147 Griffi th, D. W., 2, 51, 117, 144 Dash, Julie, 15, 43, 53, 140 Gunn, Bill, 17, 21, 29, 30, Daughters of the Dust, 140 54, 150 Davis, Angela, 75 Deleuze, Gilles, 68 Hansberry, Lorraine, 37–8 Deren, Maya, 47 Harper, Frances, 81 Diawara, Manthia, 2, 5, Hays Code, 3, 4, 144 20, 35 Head, Bessie, 37 Do the Right Th ing, 25 Hegelian dialectic, 4, 33 Du Bois, W. E. B., 37 Hepburn, Katherine, 59 Dulac, Germaine, 114 Hitchcock, Alfred, 11, 51, 81 Dunye, Cheryl, 53, 55 Hobson, Charles, 28 Duras, Marguerite, 24 Horne, Lena, 76 Hudson River School, 17 Eisenstein, Sergei, 68, 97–8 Hurston, Zora Neale, 22–3, Ellington, Duke, 143 41, 46 existential, existentialism, 65, Hutcheon, Linda, 94 79, 79, 109, 127, 132 Expressionism, Expressionist, imperfect cinema, 18 58, 133, 142 “In the Midnight Hour,” 142–3 Freedom Riders, 6 Iola Leroy, 81 French New Wave, 31 Irigaray, Luce, 25, 33, 46, 66, Frida, 120 79, 136
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 165165 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM 166 Kathleen Collins
Jackson, Samuel, 148 Márquez, Gabriel García, 42, Jameson, Fredric, 87, 89–91, 58, 83 93–4, 97 Mars, Louis, 21, 33, 46, Jim Crow, 6, 7 106–7, 109 Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, 56 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Jones, Duane, 30 126 Jones, Jacquie, 145 Merlet, Agnès, 57 Josh Lawrence Quintet, 127 Meyers, Nancy, 114 Joyce, James, 97–8 Micheaux, Oscar, 13, 85–6, Jules and Jim, 102–3, 105 105, 147, 148 Jungle Fever, 146 Minard, Michael, 141 minority, minorities, 8, 12, Kandinsky, Vassily, 127 14, 38, 42, 111, Kaplan, Nelly, 33 132, 150 Killer of Sheep, 18, 19, 22, 57 modern, modernity, 86–7, King Jr., M. L. K., 7, 144 89, 95, 127, 142, 151 Kokoschka, Oskar, 133, 136 modernism, modernist, Kristeva, Julia, Kristevan, modernist aesthetics, 94, 144 8, 12, 14, 37–8, 49, 87, 90, 93, 97–8, 101, 108, LA Independents, 4, 11, 14, 110–11, 116, 119, 17, 18, 31, 52 125–6, 128, 136, Lane, Charles, 14 137, 151 Larkin, Alile Sharon, 4 black modernism, 41 Larsen, Nella, 148 engaged modernism, 60 Lawrence, D. H., Laurentian, Moynihan Report, 146 133 Murnau, F. W., 121, 130 Lee, Spike, 3, 4, 8, 14, 22, 54, My Night with Maud, 32, 68, 56, 146 84–5, 104 Léger, Fernand, 90 “Lila,” 136–8 nationalism, nationalist, 37, Lukács, Georg, Lukácsian, 100–1, 146 19, 144 Neue Sachlichkeit, 87 Nielsen, Asta, 49 McCormack, Pearl, 122–3, 147 nostalgia, 89–90, 93–5, McCrae, Carmen, 143 97–8
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 166166 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM Index 167
O’Day, Anita, 143 Rohmer, Éric, 31, 32, 42, 68, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 84–6, 102, 104–5 58–9, 83, 87, 89 romance, romance, 18, 20, 27, One Last Look, 28–9 101–2, 105, 141 romantic, Romantic, Roman- Personal Problems, 29–30 ticism, 17, 98, 102–3, Peucker, Brigitt e, 121 105–6, 113–16, 130, 141 Phillips, Caryl, 77 Roth, Henry, 8, 29, 55–6, 58, Pirandello, Luigi, 63 60–1, 83 A Place in Time, 22, 27–8 Roundtree, Richard, 148 postmodern, 118 Rutt man, Walter, 27 post-structuralist discourse, 36, 53 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 33, 42, 65, 70, 79, 118–20 Quicksand, 148 Th e Scar of Shame, 80, 122–3, 147 Race Films, 13, 147 Scott , Seret, 20, 30, 81 realism, realist, 26, 29, 35, Th e Seashell and the Clergyman, 38, 40, 60, 61, 84, 136 98–100, 110, 114, 118, Shaft , 148 123, 144, 150 She’s Gott a Have It, 22 magical realism, 11, 38, Sidewalk Stories, 27–8 58, 86–9, 91–3, 95, 97, silent cinema, Silent era, 13, 99–100, 151 27, 52, 81, 97–8, 99n, marvelous realism, 86–7, 117, 121–2, 147 90–1, 93–4, 97, 99–100, Singleton, John, 146 134, 151 “Stepping Back,” 144–5 mythical realism, 88, 151 subaltern discourse, subaltern New Realism, 19, people, 36 100, 146 “A Summer Diary,” 139–41 surrealism, surrealist, 58, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss 87, 117, 133, 136 Song, 52, 100, 148 Reed, Ishmael, 29 synesthesia, synesthetic, 126–7 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 134 Rocha, Glauber, 19, 34 Taymor, Julie, 57, 120 Roh, Franz, 87 Th ird Cinema, 18
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 167167 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM 168 Kathleen Collins
Touch of Evil, 120 Von Sternberg, Josef, 78 Truff aut, François, 11, 51, Von Trott a, Margarethe, 52 102, 105 Tucker, Lorenzo, 64 Walker, Alice, 55 Wallace, Michele, 2, 23, universal, universalism, 146 universalist, universal- Watermelon Woman, 55 ity, universalize, 11, 35, Welles, Orson, 120 37–8, 40–4, 45, 47, 50, Who’s Afr aid of Virginia Woolf?, 53, 54, 55, 56, 69, 70, 142 84–5, 86, 90, 98, 100–2, Wiene, Robert, 117 119, 123, 132, 139, 142, Williams, Bert, 77 143, 146, 150 Williams, Spencer, 20 Within Our Gates, 85, 105 Van Peebles, Mario, 23 Witt ig, Monique, 25 Van Peebles, Melvin, 52, “W omen, Sisters, and 100, 148 Friends,” 132–4, 140 Varda, Agnès, 31–2 Woolf, Virginia, 55 vaudun, 21, 46, 106–9, 111, world literature, 33, 38, 131, 134 86, 132
66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 168168 112/10/192/10/19 10:4210:42 AMAM